St. Augustine - The saint of intelligence

RENE FULOP-MILLER

THE SAINTS WHO SHAKEN THE WORLD

SAINT AGOSTINHO, THE SAINT OF INTELLIGENCE

Translation by Oscar Mendes
eighth edition

1976

JOSÉ OLYMPIO BOOKSTORE EDITOR

TITLE OF THE NORTH AMERICAN EDITION:
THE SAINTS THAT MOVED THE WORLD
Translated by Alexander Gode and Erika Filóp-Miller
Copyright by René Filóp Miller

Rights for the Portuguese language reserved to
LIVRARIA JOSE OLYMPIO EDITOR SA

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
SANTO AGOSTINHO, O SANTO DA INTELIGENCIA

TO THE MODERN READER
"A superficial philosophy inclines man's thought toward atheism, but a deep philosophy leads human minds to religion." So wrote Lord Bacon, whose work marks a decisive shift in the history of Western thought, the shift from the Middle Ages with its acceptance of dogma and doctrine to the modern age of scientific proof and experiment.
The great philosophers forerunners of eighteenth-century rationalism were humble enough to recognize the limits of perceptual experience. They bowed respectfully and reverently to things beyond the realm of rational inquiry.
Pedro Bayle, with his skeptical philosophy, provided the foundations of enlightened rationalism, but he frankly admitted that reason suffices at best to reveal errors and not to discover truths.
João Locke, the first great British empiricist, founder of a philosophy of “common sense”, however saw in reason only a “revealing function” and reminded his readers “how restricted is the domain, simply a point, almost nothing, which our thoughts can encompass, compared to the vast expanse that transcends our faculties of thinking.”
Alexandre Pope, the poet of this new philosophical trend, suggested, with delightful sarcasm, that we should—since it is reasonable to begin by doubting all things—reserve the main force of our doubt to doubt reason itself, that force that ventures to prove the things we should doubt.
Meanwhile, however, the empirical sciences, in their search for natural laws, have made, one after another, startling discoveries, consequently inducing reason to draw the fallacious conclusion that it alone holds the key to true knowledge. With increasing freedom and boldness, the theory was proclaimed that for science there could be nothing supernatural and incomprehensible, and that, on the contrary, each phenomenon, each occurrence, could be explained by means of natural causes, lying entirely within the limits of empirical investigation. Each time a new law of nature was discovered and formulated, the humble modesty that had hitherto characterized the fathers of empiricism grew weaker, while the confident arrogance of human reason continued to grow.
Even Kant, destined to become one of the most severe critics of reason, once defined "knowledge as a revolt against the prejudices and intolerance of childhood", and Hegel, the apostle of absolute reason, welcomed the intellectual effort, "when man established his position in the head, that is, in thought, and molded reality in accordance with it," as the beginning of an era of new glories.
But reason disappointed those who had faith in its sovereignty and looked to knowledge as "the dawn of a new humanity." The era of illustration had begun as a revolt against the Church's precepts and intolerance, but as soon as it established its claim to intellectual freedom, ended its emancipation and reached power in its own right, it assumed the same attitude of reactionary intolerance that it had fought against. on your opponents of yore. He forgot that he had started by rebelling against the tutelage of scholastic dogmatism and used his success simply to replace his own prejudices with the prejudices of scholastic thought. A dogma of reason took the place of the dogma of faith. The so-called “Black Middle Ages” paved the way for a “Blacker Illustration”.
It was a veritable dictatorship of empirical reason that usurped power in the course of the 18th century. He declared, with arbitrary authoritarianism, that the results of sensory perception were the only sure form of truth. Everything outside the realm of the five senses, everything that exceeded the human powers of rational understanding, was branded as heretical. The universe—including man and all of man's intellectual and spiritual affairs—has assumed the aspect of a totalitarian kingdom governed by reason, through an administration of weights and measures of mechanical laws of nature.
Seventeenth-century scientists were prepared to complete the foundations of this arrogant rule of reason. They themselves were even able to visualize the laws of nature in harmony. with a divine plan of creation; for them, knowledge and faith had not clashed. João Kepler, for example, the discoverer of the three important laws of planetary motion, had felt as sure of God's presence in the universe as in his own soul. Sir Isaac Newton did not admit that the idea of ​​universal gravitation, which he conceived, could conflict with his faith in God. Renato Descartes — the first to proclaim the universal supremacy of reason,the thinker who postulated doubt as 'the beginning of the human quest for truth and seeks to explain in mechanical terms the movements of the stars and the beating of the heart of man and animal - was nevertheless prepared to recognize God as the steadiest and most perfect reality, as the first and most general cause of all phenomena. Blaise Pascal, to whom mathematics and physics owe the discovery of fundamental principles and laws, combined his knowledge of the laws of nature with his faith in the laws of God. The same is true of Leibniz, the man through whose work biology progressed to the status of an exact science. And even Voltaire, the great free thinker of the 18th century, wrote as a last confession: "I die worshiping God."””as for Leibniz, the man through whose work biology progressed to the position of an exact science. And even Voltaire, the great free thinker of the 18th century, wrote as a last confession: "I die worshiping God."as for Leibniz, the man through whose work biology progressed to the position of an exact science. And even Voltaire, the great free thinker of the 18th century, wrote as a last confession: "I die worshiping God."
Then the French Revolution felt called to depose God, as it had deposed the Bourbons. Pedro Gaspar Chaumette, procurator of the Paris Commune, paid tribute to the new “Goddess Reason” in a speech given on November 10, 1793, in the Cathedral of Notre Dame. “Faith has to give way to reason,” he said.
“The people of Paris have gathered in this Gothic temple, where the voice of error has so long resounded, and where today, for the first time, the trumpets of truth are sounding. Down with the priests! No more gods, but those that nature offers us!" And at the Convention, citizen Jacques Duport dramatically exclaimed: "Nature and Reason — these are my gods!"
The rationalist systematization of all the phenomena of life and nature, characteristic of eighteenth-century illustration, was taken to an extreme by the materialist and positivist tendencies of the nineteenth century.
Each new achievement of science was superiorly regarded by the agents and propagandists of rationalism as another simple step towards the final establishment of a universal Third Reich of empirical truth. Man—his consciousness and his soul—has been reduced to a complex of mechanical, physiological, biochemical, reflexological, psychoanalytic or whatever.
Cultural values ​​were regarded exclusively as the product of a mechanical interaction of cause and effect. Ethics, art, humanitarian ideals, the entire course, in short, of human history, was conceived as subject to the laws of "social physics", "social biology", the "principle of selection", "survival of the fittest" and of "historical materialism." All supersensible phenomena, which were not in accord with this mechanistic conception of a world of matter, were rejected as contrary to common sense. Faith was sabotage against omnipotent reason; religion an “opium for the people” or a “return to infantile primitivism”; the idea of ​​God was simply a symptom of "functional brain disorders."
The creative spirits of this era, however, the poets and artists, those who owed little to reason and everything to grace, refused to submit to the dictatorship of reason. Like their great ancestors, just like what Dante, Petrarch, Michelangelo, Durer, El Greco and Bach had done, they continued to profess their faith in God and in the greater truth of supersensible certainties. “Only You can inspire me,” wrote Beethoven in his diary, “You, my God, my salvation, my rock, my all; in You I will only place my trust.” Balzac and Baudelaire rejected with sovereign contempt the petty rod of reason and reaffirmed the supreme reality of faith. Feodor Dostoyéuski, Nicholas Gogol, Francis Thompson, Gerard Manley Hopkins all derived the strength of their poetic creation from their belief in God. Even the skeptical Heine wrote, in a post written to his NOVELIST:“Yes, I returned to God. I am the prodigal son... Nostalgia for heaven overcame me.” He confessed: "There is, after all, a divine spark in every human soul"
William Blake, genius at the same time in art and poetry, spoke of the physical sense of vision as a means of reaching beyond the limits of the senses. “I don't question my corporeal or vegetative eye any more than I would,” he wrote, “a window over any landscape. I look through him and not him.” He believed in the reality of supersensible visions, because he had had them himself. For Blake “the treasures of heaven are not mere realities of the intellect, they are real heavenly entities! A vision is not a cloud of vapor or nothingness. It is organized and minutely articulated beyond all that mortal and perishable nature can produce. I say that all my visions seem to me infinitely more perfect and more organized than anything seen by mortals.”
Van Gogh, after spending his whole life painting peasants, apple trees and sunflowers, confessed from the depths of his religious conviction that, had he been able to do so, he would have liked to have painted the figures of saints. "They would have become men and women like the first Christians."
“I'm even with life”, said Strindberg, in a final balance, “and the balance shows that the word of God is the only one certain” Paulo Claudel finally referred to poetry as a form of prayer, because in its purity it is divine creation and bears witness before God.
Poetry and prayer are but two expressions of a single yearning of the human soul.
However, even within the ranks of the army of reason symptoms, often increasing, of low morale and lack of discipline were noted. There were a good number of lukewarm, irresolute, profane, defeatist partisans. Schopenhauer's language was that of a traitor and deserter. He spoke of reason, saying that it was “a partial function of thought” and insisted that “the sphere of existence proper to the human spirit” lies beyond the domain of the senses. "The physical world is not a mother, but simply loves the living spirit of God within us."
The most fatal blow against the dictatorship of reason, however, was prepared within the inner sanctum of rationalism itself, that is, in the laboratories and observatories, where exact science, commissioned by reason, was busy trying to prove with scales and scales, tables and formulas, that the mechanical laws of nature are universally valid. As the methods of inquiry became more and more refined, the results they produced proved more and more incomprehensible, in purely rational terms. The Austrian physicist Ernst Mach was forced to assert that a more critical examination of the philosophical dogmas of “illustration” could find in them nothing but a new mythology conceived in mechanical terms. He expressed his doubts about the applicability of reason in the domain of natural science and wrote:"When we thought we were successful in understanding a process, what actually happened was that we connected unknown incomprehensibilities and known incomprehensibilities."
Workers in the most diverse branches of modern research have reached similar conclusions. To the student of astrophysics the bodies of stellar space no longer appeared as a system of stars, moving, as in clockwork, along perfectly calculable and permanently immutable paths.
On the contrary, it became evident that the universe is undergoing continuous change, that it expands and contracts, without our being able to say for what reasons and in accordance with what laws.
But if reason disillusioned man when he contemplated the stellar universe, the domain of the infinitely great, no less disillusioned him in the domain of the infinitely small, in the region of the tiniest entities, barely discernible by the most powerful microscope. In the world of molecules and atoms, it was found that the method of reason of weighing, measuring and formulating natural laws was no longer applicable in many respects.
Scientists came to the conclusion that what had been interpreted as laws of nature were in reality nothing more than the results of the calculation of probabilities. This calculation of probabilities, with its statistical averages, applied only to enormous numbers of examples, to almost innumerable repetitions of one and the same process. In the realm of the infinitely small, in the world of atoms and electrons, however, these large numbers could no longer be found. Here prevailed the power we call chance: a microcosmic fate that mocks the calculus of reason. So it became at all debatable whether any laws, referring to individual molecular processes, could be rationally formulated, or whether the human forces of knowledge did not confront here insurmountable barriers.
The more biology advanced, the more impossible biologists found to reduce the life of even the tiniest plants to a rational formula. They were forced to note that "the Newton of the grass leaf had not yet appeared and never would."
In short, it became increasingly evident that the expansion of the domain of science ran parallel with a contraction of the sphere of phenomena that reason and calculus could explain. The materialist prophecy that the end of the nineteenth century would see the end of religious beliefs had dwindled to zero. The rule of purely causal thought, which was expected to last a thousand years, was forced - precisely by the expansion of scientific discoveries - to recognize its true position as nothing more than a provisional government. Lord Bacon's prophecy that "a profound philosophy leads human minds to religion" was true.
The new trend in the history of human thought is clearly apparent in the works of the great American philosopher and psychologist William James. His pragmatic doctrine accepted the data of experience as the criterion of all reality. On this basis, he saw in religious experiences the pragmatic corroboration of the reality of a divine principle and in visionary phenomena the pragmatic demonstration of a realm of supersensible facts. James was also the first to reach the conclusion that the fundamentals of the spirit of religion are not incompatible with modern science and its methods of thinking. As a true champion of unprejudiced criticism, he upheld man's right, and even his need to believe.Thus his philosophy became the charter of a liberal and free-thinking trend that maintained its struggle against the prejudices of dogmatic reason. For a century faith had been locked in the concentration camp of rationalist materialism. She had gone underground and continued to work in the realms of poetry and romantic thought, but now - thanks to James she was freed and restored to all her rights and honors.
And then—just over a century and a quarter after the French Revolution had established the dictatorship of reason, with its goal of universal domination—another French revolution was breaking out—this time a revolution of thought. A new philosophical trend, under the influence and leadership of Emilio Boutroux and Henrique Bergson, began to undermine the absolute rule of rationalism and struggle to restore the validity of metaphysical truths. With William James, metaphysical truths had enjoyed equal rights with the truths of reason and sensible perception, but they were now restored to their former position of sovereign power. God, whom the National Convention had exiled, could return to France.
This new phase of French thought did not conceive of religion as a vestige of primitive thought or a mere accessory product of backward economic conditions, but rather as a category in man's spiritual life to which reason should be subordinated.
In light of this new philosophy, God appeared as a profonde raison; the spirit that is the universe was the supreme action; faith in God meant knowledge of the acte de vivre; the mystical experience constituted a participation in the nature fondamentale and the ethical efforts of man signified a restitution of Dieu dans la nature.
The anti-religious doctrine of rationalism and illustration had left France, in its rush to conquer the world. So did the new trend in pro-religious philosophy.
It was given a scientific basis when the results of modern research made it possible to recognize, beyond the limits of physical observation, a spiritual principle as the prime mover of all creation.
Kant claimed that it was his duty to "abandon knowledge to give way to faith." But in contrast to him, who thus stipulated a radical separation between science and religion, an ever-increasing number of important physicists, astrophysicists, mathematicians and biologists are now of the opinion that science and religion are not only enemies of each other, but constitute in their intimacy. -relation a complete picture of the world.

Here are men who have managed, thanks to the most modern methods of thought and research, to penetrate the unlimited distances of immaterial space, measure the immaterial speed of light, probe the world of the infinitely small, of atoms and electrons, apply mathematical principles to the problems of time, space and relativity, unravel the most hidden secrets of living cells and organic developments. And in the course of their work, an entirely new conception of the universe unfolded before them, taking them farther and farther away from the primitive artificial and mechanistic hypothesis of materialism to the idea that the universe is modeled after a living order, conceived by a divine Creator.
These modern scientists think again—as did their great precursors Kepler, Newton, Pascal—about the Creator and Creation, physical law and divine immanence, "sensory data" and "value data" as an entity harmonica.
Supported by their penetrating scientific investigations, they proclaim not only their factual discoveries but also the eternal validity of the truth of faith.
"With astonishing rapidity, within the past twenty years man has extended his vision," wrote the great American fictitious Roberto Andrews Millikan. he discovered an infinitely smaller nucleus. He then looked into this nucleus and observed the interplay of the radiation on the electrons, both inside and outside the nucleus, and everywhere he found wonderful order and systematization. his microscope on the living cell and found it even more complex than the atom, with many parts, each performing its necessary function for the life of the whole. And once again, he turned his great telescope to the spiral nebula, a million away of light years, and there he also found system and order.”
Considering all this, Millikan exclaimed: “Is there still anyone who talks about the materialism of science? On the contrary, the scientist joins the psalmist of a thousand years past as he reverently witnesses that the Heavens proclaim the glory of God and the Heavens manifest His work. The God of Science is the spirit of rational order and orderly development, the integral factor in the world of atoms, ether, ideas, duties and intelligence.” Millikan, who investigated the penetrating power of cosmic rays, who managed to isolate the electron and measuring its charge, he concluded, based on his scientific discoveries, that “there is an interrelation, a unity, a uniqueness, in all nature and yet it is still a wonderful mystery... the modern science of reality," wrote Milikan,"you are little by little learning to walk humbly with your God, and by learning this lesson, you are contributing in some way to religion."
Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, one of the leading English astrophysicists of modern times, derived from his research on the motion of stars, stellar evolution and relativity the conclusion that a purely physical investigation of nature is limited and needs to be supplemented by observations of a religious point of view.
“The aim of science,” wrote Eddington, “as far as it reaches its scope, is to discover the fundamental structure underlying the world; but science must also explain, if it can, or even humbly accept, the fact that from this world have risen spirits capable of transmuting mere structure into the richness of our experience. If the spirit world has been transmuted by a religious color to something beyond what is implied in its mere outward qualities, it may be permitted to assert with equal conviction that this is not a misinterpretation, but the action of a divine element in human nature." At his famous Gifford lectures, Eddington reached the ultimate conclusion: *Donc Dieu Exists!”
Galileo's phrase that nature is a document written in the language of mathematics has been accepted, for all past centuries, as an axiom of the “classical” sciences of nature. Modern mathematicians, having studied all the syntactic and grammatical subtleties of this spiritual idiom of nature, call mathematics the "language of divinity." Sir James Hopwood Jeans, the English astronomer and physicist, is of the opinion that the universe is governed by mathematical laws, invented and applied by God. The conception of the universe, which Jeans derived from his research in cosmogony and stellar dynamics, reveals the petty inadequacy of the “enlightened” idea of ​​a clock-mechanism-universe and assigns it its proper place in the junk pile of thoughts outside of use.
“The universe,” wrote Jeans, “begins to look more like a big thought than a big machine. Thought no longer appears as an occasional intruder into the realm of matter; we are beginning to suspect that, on the contrary, we must acclaim him as the creator and ruler of the realm of matter—not, without a doubt, our individual thoughts, but the thought in which the atoms, from which our individual thoughts sprang, exists as thought. .”
God is the ultimate truth of modern science—whether it concerns the extreme smallness of electrons or the extreme greatness of the universe.
Looking through the spiritual mouse-hole of the materialistic past, the narrow, dark world appears. Above him there are no radiant heights unfolding. The scientific materialists of years past displayed an attitude of cynical indifference to all higher values. Whether they were God, soul, faith, art, love, courage, or devotion—should the typical materialist try to "displace" them, or at least degrade them and demonstrate their functional dependence on some mechanism of cause and effect.
In its most modern phase, the natural sciences were able to free themselves from the bankrupt philosophy of materialism and move away from it, from its empty cynicism towards the idea of ​​“values”. Thanks to the discoveries of modern science, God returned to the universe and again directs the movements of the stars, the speed of light, the rotations of atoms and electrons, as well as the fate of individual souls and the fate of peoples. And the laws according to which He does so are eternal values—for all creation and for each individual man.
“In the universe”, wrote Alfredo North Whitehead, the eminent contemporary philosopher and professor of applied mathematics, “there is a unity enjoying value and, by its eminence, sharing value. We call this unity God, God is the one through whom there is importance, value and ideal beyond the real; He is the One who holds the sights before living experience... The universe exhibits a creativity with infinite freedom, and a realm of forms with infinite possibilities; but this creativity and these forms are entirely powerless to trim the reality of the complete ideal harmony, which is God.”
Such views mark the mathematician Whitehead as a great religiously oriented philosopher. “It is the theological intuition of religion,” he wrote, “that gives our view of nature the necessary completion. The peculiar character of religious truth is its explicit relationship with values. It brings into our consciousness that permanent side of the universe that we can be interested in.
“But values ​​have a passion for achievement in the world of action and when, through the creative process, they enter this world, they endow the transitory moment with the meaning of the permanent. Separated from the religious vision, human life is just a flash of occasional pleasures, illuminating a mass of color and misery, a trifle of passing experience...
“When we consider what religion is to humanity, and what science is, it would be no exaggeration to say that The future course of history depends on the decision of this generation regarding the reactions between them. Here we have the two most powerful general forces influencing man, the strength of our religious intuitions and the strength of our drive for accurate observation and logical deduction. There are broader truths and more beautiful perspectives within which a reconciliation of a deeper religion and a more subtle science will be found.”
The loss of prestige that anti-metaphysical materialism suffered in the realm of inorganic nature was bad enough; but the results of his attempt to gain foothold in the realms of life and consciousness as well - in biology, genetics, psychology and sociology were utterly grotesque in the perfection of their gross failure. For here materialism came to embrace the vigorous reality of ever-changing forms and never-repeating events. And the more boldly he tried to attack the problems of life—to deduce living phenomena from dead mechanical laws—the more inadequate were the things he had to present by way of result.
On the desks of their laboratories, in the filing cabinets of their studios, the materialists had piles and piles of fact reports, physicochemical formulas, psychological tests, and statistical summaries; the mass was impressive, but the meaning negligible. The secrets of form, spontaneous happenings, character and personality could not be discovered by adding sums and compilations of facts. The busy hive of materialist science could not but despise the most important thing: the divine spirit, the only one capable of explaining the ever-variable multiplicity of organic forms emerging from immutable molds.
Confronted with the miracles of living reality, the technique of rational materialism turned out, in the final analysis, to be just “an error that only 'make God'”, being simply capable of imitating what had already been created, or reducing the pieces what is already made known.”
Darwin, from whose theory of evolution materialist philosophy drew the courage to enter more and more into the realm of living phenomena, it happened once that he came to lose, for an instant, in the face of the spectacle of a tropical forest, the thread of his mechanical principles and exclaimed: "No man can remain here without feeling that these woods are temples filled with the various products of the God of nature, and that there is more in man than the breath of his body."
Since Darwin's time our knowledge of living things, and indeed our conception of all of nature, has undergone fundamental change. The late physicist and botanical physiologist Sir Jagadis Bose—using specially constructed instruments to give accurate measurements to the nearest millionth of an inch—made the staggering discovery that trees and plants are sensitive creatures. "Plants have hearts and emotions and even steel and other metals can feel." Sir Jagadis did not need to go to a rainforest to feel the spirit of God in nature.
At the same time, but working in an entirely verse field, the brain anatomist Constantine von Monakoff investigated, in his laboratory in Switzerland, the cellular structure of the nervous tissue of the brain and spinal cord and found that mental and spiritual phenomena cannot be explained by physicochemical processes within the nervous system, but force the scholar to return to the assumption of a divine principle as its ultimate cause.
The more science progresses in its investigation of biogenetic events, the more the crude principles of a merely quantitative approach to psychological problems are left behind, giving way to the qualitative approach of genetic and dynamic methods, the more apparent it becomes that it simply will not conceive man as "that part of the mechanism of nature in which the functions of consciousness and sensitivity have been conditioned to a relatively high degree of efficiency" Quite the contrary! We must again have ac to conceive of man as the realization of a divine thought and understand that growth and evolution mean the unfolding of a plan drawn up by God.
Darwin's certainty of God was a momentary sensation. In the decades that have followed, a remarkable reorientation has brought the science of man — in both its psychological and sociological branches — ever closer to accepting a divine principle. Darwin's disciple Herbert Spencer interpreted life, thought, and society still in terms of matter, motion, and force; but compared with the accounts, in the present day, that scientists present of their researches, Spencer's works are little more than the painstaking efforts of a primary, placed side by side with the manuscript of a trained writer, who masters the art of expressing new thoughts through the same group of letters.
The lesson that the eminent Oxfordian biologist Sir John Scott Haldane deduced from his investigations is expressed as follows:
“The world of Nature that surrounds us is not a simple physical-chemical or biological world, but a world in which the personality is just as incarnated as in our own bodies. For certain practical purposes, we may think of it as a simple physical-chemical or biological world, but as the world of our experience is not only a world of personality, but also of divine personality... Not only does God's personality manifest in our universe world, but ourselves, as far as we struggle in search of what is divine. we are partakers, albeit imperfectly, of the divine personality... The visible and tangible universe is much more than can be interpreted in terms of traditional physical science.The ultimate interpretation is the spiritual interpretation by which whatever is clearly definable in the visible and tangible world is the manifestation of God...
Apart from the existence of God, living and active, reality has no ultimate significance... We must accept the results of physical science as a partial interpretation, "and so religion is not only compatible with the legitimate conclusions of natural science, but the intrepid and faith-filled pursuit of natural science becomes a contribution to relative truth—a part of religion itself.”
For more than a century rational materialism has been at odds with the faith. Its lawyers have brought a considerable number of witnesses, — physicists, mathematicians and biologists, whose testimonies were intended to demonstrate that materialism means progress, that he has exceptional qualifications to lead and that faith should be accused as a criminal retrograde.
Things are taking a decidedly different turn these days. The advantages are clearly against reason.
More and more the testimonies gathered in the laboratories and offices of exact science turn into evidence for the defense, and against materialism many unpleasant things have been said by its own experts and authorities.
“Science,” says witness Millikan, “is often accused of inducing a materialist philosophy. But Materialism is certainly not a sin of modern science. If anything the progress of modern physics has taught, it is that a dogmatic assertion about everything that exists or does not exist in the universe, as described by nineteenth-century materialism, is not scientific, not true. The physicist has had the argument of his generalizations so completely useless that he learned from Job that it is madness to multiply words without knowledge, as did all those who once claimed that the universe should be interpreted in terms of inflexible, solid, soulless atoms and their movements. The mechanistic philosophy went bankrupt.”
But witness Sir John Scott Haldane goes even further, when he declares that "materialism, once scientific theory, and now fatalistic creed of thousands, is nothing but a superstition..."
The Jury, composed of modern women and men , intelligent and liberal, bases her verdict on the views expressed by witnesses Millikan, Eddington, Jeans, Whitehead, Haldane. Proceeding against faith is annulled. Reason, plaintiff, is now suspected as actually guilty of reactionary delay, but the process is not enforced, as it appears that the new defendant is honestly willing to correct his mistakes.
The modern reader who has opened this book on the saints and has found its first pages devoted to a general examination of philosophical attitudes and the results of modern scientific research will gladly receive the following explanation:
The general examination, which we have just completed, seemed indispensable to define the author's philosophical and scientific position and the basis on which he rests this new appreciation of the saints, the description of their lives, the narrative of their deeds and the analysis of their cultural and sociological importance in the past, present and hence in the future.
In writing this book about the saints, the author wished to both acknowledge their debt and respond to an evident need of the truly progressive trends of thought in modern times.
Most of the history books at hand are mere repetitions of their eighteenth- and nineteenth-century predecessors, whose errors and prejudiced conclusions they seem to have gone to great lengths to preserve. As a result, they more obstruct than clarify the reader's views. They exhaust themselves in a pedantic and confusing enumeration of dates; they try to paint as ideals of heroism and as great conductors of humanity those who were really political turnstiles and glorified murderers of peoples; or—worst of all—take on scientific airs by recording, faithful to the style of historical materialism, data on production, prices, and supply and demand indices. As a result, the stories of saints, their thoughts and actions, remained the special domain,or the writers of pleasantly edifying treatises or the monomaniacs of psychoanalysis, who are not aware that the nineteenth century is over, and mix the lives of saints of past centuries with the judicial histories of their patients in Vienna, Berlin, and New York.
Yet the most modern scientific creed has carried out complete justification of supersensible values ​​in life and nature. New epoch of human thought has begun. Nowa "reform" proceeds that tries to reform the orthodox faith in reason. We are witnessing a new “renaissance”, which is concerned with bringing man's appreciation back to the constructive wisdom and beauty of faith. A move "illustration" will lead to victory, emancipate our thinking from the dogmatic intolerance of materialism, restore our privilege of a truly unprejudiced appraisal of history, and enable us to fully and freely evaluate the scissors of the past.
We 20th century men and women are proud of our adherence to the ideal of social justice, our democratic creed, our human principles, our contempt for all forms of racial prejudice, our understanding of economic problems, of our interests and of our organizations of universal scope. But all of these achievements are ultimately a legacy entrusted to us by a past steeped in divine faith, and if we recognize that as caretakers and trustees of the past we are striving to preserve and develop the values ​​that have been handed down to us by an ancient tradition, we are also paying tribute to the saints of the past who created those values ​​and testified to their excellence in all that they practiced.
Among the saints are the first proclaimers of humanitarian ideals, the first fighters for social justice, the first champions of the poor. They considered all nations and races equal; their horizon was truly global; they were the first slave liberators. They established the sanctity of work and were the first to insist on its ethical category. They elevated women to the position of companions to men and assigned new importance to their roles in the social structure. They were the spiritual advisers of humanity, the protagonists of intellectual freedom, the first educators and the founders of the first scientific institutes. Whether we study history from a political or economic point of view, whether we consider the domains of culture or science and technology,Everywhere we will discover that the saints proclaimed it and fought for it, for this kind of culture that we are now fighting to preserve.
Furthermore, the lives of the saints contain a message of beauty and hope. All our cultural treasures, eternal values ​​and ideals of moral progress, charity, love and justice, our appreciation of art and our sense of the greatness of the natural world are expressions of a form of creative energy that has its fire in the lives of the saints and radiates from them.
But if we ask in turn what gave the saints such creative powers, enabling them to exert decisive influence over the cultural course of centuries, subsequent to the present and, incessantly, into the future, the answer is simply that it was yours. faith in a supernatural reality that stands above the reality of the senses your faith in a divine law that is stronger than the miseries and necessities of life on earth; in an eternity that is truer than the moment; in an order and beauty of which the unbridled confusion of the order and beauty of earthly existence is but a misconception. They believed that man is capable of understanding the orders of God, of harmonizing with them the demands of life on earth, of giving lasting value to the moment, and of pursuing his ideals until their definitive realization.
The saints believed in Christ, whose kingdom, which “was not of this world,” was becoming a reality in this world.
Christ, whom the saints strove to imitate, undertook His divine mission on earth as a man among men; He suffered and died under the laws of this world, yet in Him the ethical demands, love and beauty of the divine principle achieved full realization on earth. This is what encouraged the saints, who began their lives as ordinary men and women, to follow Christ; who convinced them that they would be able to reach Him if they were careful, in all their walks, never to lose sight of His footsteps.
What elevated them to the state of holiness was that they had succeeded in extricating themselves from their low beginnings and worldly attachments, in mastering their innate weakness in reaching the ultimate heights of human existence.
It is this attempt on the part of the saints that constituted the great message that the lives they lived and the examples they set will continue to present at all times. Their struggles and problems, their thoughts and actions, refute cultural pessimism, the natural corollary of all forms of materialistic disbelief. His message of optimism is the simple truth that man is not a toy in the hands of blind forces, that he is not forever doomed to sustain "a fratricidal war of all against all", that he is not the product of the material conditions of production and the victim of irremediable economic ills; who is a creature of God, a free being, the master and not the slave of his race, his time and his environment,— that he is destined to live on earth until the germ of divine perfection that remains in him can grow is to become strong.
The message of human beginnings and the saints' divine deeds is a message of comfort and confidence.
The French writer Maurício Barrês was once asked: “What are the saints for?” He replied: "They delight the soul!"
Of the twenty-five thousand saints recognized by the Church, five were chosen to be included in this book. They are the five whom renunciation, intelligence, love, will and ecstasy enabled them to dedicate themselves to imitate Christ and to serve as guides on the path to human perfection.

RFM
Croton-on-Hudson, September 1945.

The author thanks Mrs. Steffi Kiesler of the New York Public Library and Mrs. Catherine Clark for all they have done to assist him in his task.

NOTE ON RENÉ FULÓP-MILLER
Born in 1891, in the Banat region of Hungary, later ceded to Romania. His father was an Alsatian emigrant, his mother originally from Serbia. The breadth of his background is in keeping with the versatility of his genius. As a journalist, editor and creative writer, he has resided in Vienna, Paris, Budapest, Moscow, London, Los Angeles, New York and many other places. He established his name as a writer with The Mind and Face of Bolshevism and the biographies of Lenin and Gandhi, Tolstoy, Dostoyéuski and Pope Leo XIII. He has also written books on Russian and American theater, and on medical science—such as his recent bestseller, Triumph over Pain—and many other subjects of historical and cultural importance.
In the United States, he is best known as the author of Rasputin, the Holy Devil and The Power and Secret of the Jesuits. In these books, Fúlop-Miller reveals the same qualities that loom large in this volume of the history of the saints: a passionate, almost mystical understanding of religious problems and experiences, coupled with a clear, scientific knowledge of all facets of human psychology.
The man who wrote this book was a disciple of the famous psychiatrists Babinski, Forel and Freud. He also underwent, of his own free will, the mental and spiritual training of the "Exercises" of Ignatius of Loyola, and lived as a hermit in the curious republic of monks on the Greek island of Matos, from which he returned to the world — like very few others. they did — to continue his career as a great writer, covering topics of eternal human interest.

SAINT AUGUSTINE
THE SAINT OF INTELLIGENCE

BY THE TIME ST. ANTONY DIED, at the age of one hundred and five, on Mount Colzin, in the desert, St. Augustine had barely passed his infancy. Born in the year 354, in the small town of Tagasta, in the eastern part of the African province of Numidia, this saint was destined to exert, through his theological and philosophical works, a decisive influence on the cultural development of the Western world.
The extreme target pursued by these two saints was the same. Both Antony and Augustine struggled to get closer to God. But the paths they followed to reach the common goal were fundamentally different. All your problems, all your struggles and experiences, all your efforts and attitudes, your entire lives, both internally and externally, were different, like day and night.
Antony went through the years of his early childhood, almost exactly a century before Augustine, almost exactly a hundred years closer to the time of Christ's life on earth. Antony grew up in Egypt, a Christian region of ancient religious traditions, Augustine in Numidia, modern Algeria, a Roman colony without tradition.
Antao's home village, Coma, was located on the banks of the Nile, and its entire existence depended on the benefits of the great river.
Augustine's birthplace, the provincial city of Thagaste, was located at the junction of several military roads and owed its prosperity to the money soldiers and travelers spent on its bazaars and baths, its circuses, theaters and other places of entertainment. .

The first impressions that Antony, the child of the Nile, received from his surroundings were inspired by the presence of God in nature; for the city boy, Augustine, first impressions were linked to the worldly pursuit of business and pleasure.
“Have faith in things that are eternal and renounce things that are passing away,” was the Nile's message to young Antao; and the desert invited him, called him: “Here where the tomb of human idleness has no place, you will see the Lord face to face. Abandon yourselves to prayer and you will be blessed.”
“Have faith in the things of the moment and enjoy them to your heart's content” was the lesson young Augustine learned in the streets of Thagasta. The bazaars and places of pleasure seduced him: “Enter! Here there is pleasure, here there is joy! All you need is money, if you want to experience the delight of life.”
How different also was the atmosphere in their parents' homes and the early education that shaped the characters of these two saints.
Antony's parents were orthodox Copts and all their actions and reactions were determined by the demands of their creed.
Augustine's parents did not share the same faith. His father, Patricio, was a pagan, and his mother, Monica, a Christian. Dogmatic disputes were the first impression Augustine received in matters of human religion.
Disputes and lack of harmony constituted almost entirely the primitive and basic experience that Augustine had in his parents' home. Patricio and Monica, in reality, did not live with each other, but rather against and apart from each other.
The example Antao's father set for his son was that of an industrious farmer. Augustine's father was a careless and indolent lesser official in the provincial administration. Antao's family lived under the discipline of an austere man and puritanical principles. In Augustine's case, the head of the family was an unprincipled rake who did not take his marital vows very seriously.
It wasn't just Patricio's relationship with Monica that made him an extremely inadvisable role model for his son.
His uneven character, his unbridled temperament, completely disqualified him from the role of educator. He was complacent when he happened to be in a good mood, but when he was in the trances of one of his sudden tantrums, he would dish out punishments without reason or discrimination. His irascible violence and unreasonable arbitrariness made a more lasting impression on Augustine than his good-natured indulgence. For Antao, his father's discipline meant guidance and training; for Augustine, an injustice and a misfortune. Antony admired his father. She obeyed him, loved him. Augustine's father only deserved contempt, fear, hatred from his son.
Monica's restraint, which formed such a shocking contrast to her husband's character, could only serve to intensify Augustine's lack of respect for his father. As a devout Christian Monica taught her son that there is one God, all justice, all goodness, whom we must regard as our true father, and who it is to Him, above all others, that we owe obedience and respect.
When Antony's father died, he simply had to transfer his love, respect, and obedience from his procreator to the Creator.
In Augustine's youthful mind, his dual dependence on his earthly father and heavenly Father at first produced only confusion, with the result that he rejected both the paternal authority of Patrick and God.
In Antao's youth, formal education played no role. For the development of Augustine it was of decisive importance. The first years at school were not, it is true, of outstanding value for inculcating moral and ethical models in the mind of the young Augustine. The stick was the symbol of authority in the hands of teachers, and progress in reading, writing, arithmetic, and good behavior was hastened by the application of periodic spankings. In this way Augustine came to consider education as synonymous with coercion and punishment. His lessons and studies were a painful torment.
Augustine's earliest recollections are characteristically childish sins of commission and omission. He didn't like to study, he wrote in the Confessions. “Those first lessons in reading, writing and arithmetic, I considered them a great burden and punishment, like the Greek later. I would much rather play than study. And through countless lies I deceived my preceptor, my teachers, my parents, about my taste for toys, my eagerness to see vain shows and my impatience to imitate them.”
To satisfy this irresistible yearning for games and amusements, Augustine did not back down from cheating and falsehood. "In the game," he admits, "I often sought the disloyal struggle, myself being dominated, however, by the vain desire for pre-eminence." And his desire to be victorious in all contests was so strong that he could not bear the thought of having to admit defeat and preferred to cheat rather than give in. "I stole equally from my parents' cellar," he wrote, "so I could have things to give the boys who sold me the taste of playing with me.”
Monica tried everything to lead her son to the right path.
As a devout Christian, she extolled him to the glory of God and admonished him to be constant in prayer. Augustine, however, only prayed when he had been playing mischief and wished to escape punishment. Then he prayed fervently, "breaking the chains of his tongue," in the hope that God would deliver him from the wrath of his elders. When his faults were discovered and the ardor of his prayer was found unable to shield him from punishment, he immediately abandoned his faith in God.
Although Augustine had been raised by his mother in the Christian faith, he had not been baptized. It was the custom of the time not to administer baptism to infants, but only to adults, mature enough to appreciate the significance and responsibility of the baptismal sacrament.
Once the boy Augustine asked to be baptized. The reason, however, for wanting to confess his faith in God was no less selfish than the purpose of his earlier prayers. He had been knocked down by a severe attack of gastric fever. When the pains became too strong, he was overcome by the terror of death. Suddenly he remembered that his mother had praised the Lord, as the only help in danger and pain, He asked to be baptized. His afflicted mother was about to grant his request when he unexpectedly regained health overnight. His fear of death passed and with it... his thoughts of God.
What Augustine later came to be accomplished in opposition to what he was at first.
This is particularly true if one considers his development, beyond his childhood years, through his adolescence and early manhood to the time of his change and conversion, For the bad boy grew up to be a dissipating boy and a fickle man. fickle For all their disagreements, both Augustine's casual father and his practical-minded mother were of the opinion that their son should pursue a profitable career. To help you in this, no sacrifice would be too great for them.
Patricio, whom Agostinho described as “a poor citizen of Thagaste”, lived on a modest income and had nothing to his name except a little house and a vineyard. He was never free from financial straits, yet every penny he could save set aside for his son's education to ensure his future of success and prosperity.

At the age of thirteen, Augustine was sent to the next town of Madauros. At school there he would have to prepare himself to become a professor of Rhetoric which at that time was, from the financial point of view, a very promising profession.
In Madauros, the lazy student of Thagasta has suddenly become a struggling young student. Yet this unexpected thirst for knowledge was entirely confined to the intellectual values ​​of the pagan tradition. At home Augustine had spoken almost exclusively the Punic dialect of Numidia, but now he was captivated by the brilliant charm of Latin, the language of polite society, and with him by the rich tradition of pagan Roman literature. He was particularly impressed by Virgil, whose influence can be seen in the style of his later prose writings. So it happened that Augustine, who was to be one of the most important authors of the Christian Church, received his first inspiration from pagan literature.
Augustine progressed rapidly in his studies. But at the end of two years, he had to return from Madauros to Tagasta because his father could no longer support him in his studies. The period of idleness that followed, coinciding with all the confusion and uneasiness of puberty, only served to accentuate his baser instincts.
Child and no longer child, man but not entirely man, in this period of transition between two phases of his sexual development, the malignity of a boy mingled turbulently with the unbridled excesses of a boy. The bad company he frequented did not fail to influence him either.
As a child, he had looted his parents' cellar and pantry so that he could bribe his fellow players. Now he stole because he found a strange delight in malpractice.
A vivid description of this is found in the Confessions of Augustine. “There was a pear tree near our vineyard, laden with fruits, which were neither tempting in color nor in taste. To steal this, some of our wicked companions went late at night and took out heavy loads of pears, not to eat them, but to throw them, in fact, to the swine. It was abhorrent, but it pleased me. Once upon a time, the pleasure I felt was not in the pears, it came from the offense itself, which the company of sinful comrades occasioned.”
It was at this time that, like a violent storm, the heritage of paternal African sensuality erupted in him. Patricio looked at it with joy and pride. Monica, with horror and fear.
Augustine himself relates how he and his father went to see one of the Roman baths in Thagaste. Those public baths were often visited for purely social reasons and not just for people who wanted to exercise or take part in athletic games and disputes. In certain sections, men and women could bathe together. It was there that Patricio had his first proof of his son's virility. “The little boy is becoming a complete man,” he said to himself, delightedly. And when he got home, he talked to his wife about it, half amused and half proud, as he relished the idea of ​​being surrounded by a whole bunch of grandchildren. Monica, however, was deeply distressed, as she instinctively recognized that now her influence over her son would be increasingly reduced. is, in fact,the period of puberty marked the time when Augustine completely emancipated himself from his mother's authority.
With merciless self-criticism, Augustine admits in his Confessions the erotic aberrations of his adolescence; he accuses himself of "carnal corruption" and laments that "the bushes of impure desires grew lush on my head and there were no hands capable of pulling them out." He also had to reproach himself for having “stained the fountain of friendship with the filth of lust” and went on to say: “He did not respect the measure of love, spirit to spirit, shining limits of friendship, not being able to discern the crystalline clarity of the love from the fog of lust Both boiled confusedly within me and drove my shifting youth to the precipice of ungodly desires and plunged it into an abyss of wickedness. I completely resigned myself to it”
When Monica summoned him to desist from his licentious conduct, he regarded his words as "woman's babble." He wrote: "To follow his advice would be a shame to me, for I was ashamed of not being shameless. My depraved companions might laugh at me.” Equating them or even surpassing them in depravity was at that time his greatest ambition. Thus acted the man who was destined to become the most austere censor of himself and of others, who would follow the trail of evil to its true source in original sin and the corruption of the human flock.
After a year of great savings and thanks to the help of a rich friend named Romanian, Patricio was able to raise the necessary money for his son to continue his studies. At the age of seventeen, Augustine was thus sent to an advanced course at the school of Rhetoric in Carthage.

At that time, Carthage was the metropolis of Africa and was located in the vicinity of modern Tunis. For a young man of Augustine's type, that great colonial city, with its sensual and pleasure-loving population, was a paradise and a dream come true. His sojourn there marked the zenith of his career of complacency, the nadir of his morality, the most impious station along his path to holiness.
Courtesans from Egypt and voluminous Numidian girls strolled invitingly through the streets. Places of pleasure offered the prospect of unruly orgies. And clowns of every kind trumpeted the promise of the rawest qualities of fun. In the temptation of the unbridled enjoyment of life, which had been held back by the provincialism of Thagaste, he found freedom in the unfettered vulgarity of a great metropolis. “I went to Carthage”, wrote Augustine in the Confessions, “where a surge of love resounded in my ears.” And then he explained: “I didn't love it yet, but I loved love. I sought what I could love, in love with love, hated my own safety. For I was burning to sate myself with base things and I dared to become unruly again, with these various and tenebrous loves. And despite my unbridled immorality,thanks to an excessive vanity, I strove to be elegant and courteous.”
It was also in Carthage that Agostinho came to feel bewitched by the theater. He wasn't just an enthusiastic spectator who never missed a show. He was a theatrical writer and he was passionate about his burning ambition to achieve fame as an actor.
However, what attracted him to the stage was not so much the art of drama as the semi-sentimental, semi-cynic representation of social life without morality, in which he himself took pleasure.
Courtesans, libertines, lechers, impostors, fools and parasites, pimps and pimps were the heroes and heroines; adultery, seduction of innocent maidens, betrayals of brothers and friends, contempt for ethics and morals, and mockery and mockery of the gods, were the themes of all those plays.
Later $. Augustine described, with a penitent heart, the effect that theater had had on him in his youth: “The plays swept me away, full of images of my miseries and new wood for my fire... I rejoiced with lovers when they enjoyed each other corruptly and shared in their pernicious pleasures, even though they were imaginary and took place only on stage. And when one lost the other, I was saddened by them, as if that had really happened to me.”
Sometimes the young pleasure-lover would remember his mother's warning not to forget God, and more for her sake than for the sake of his soul's salvation, he would go to attend, one time or another, the religious ceremony. But during Mass, Patricio's son immediately tried to discover some beautiful woman whose head, bowed in prayer, and whose face, full of solemn reverence, aroused his passionate desire. During the sacred ceremonies, Augustine kept wondering how he could manage to attract the attention of the adored beauty, and as the faithful joined their voices in prayer, he whispered seductive words in the ears of the young woman kneeling beside him.
Finally he got tired of the constant fluctuations of his "dark passions" and decided to form one of those unions of mancebia, at that time considered tolerable, even among Christians. Melanie was a chrysah girl from the lower classes, a fact which may explain why he never legalized his relations with her. His life with her, therefore, was unsatisfactory just because it had not been consecrated by the sacrament of marriage. No deeply human relationship could link that man to that woman, for Augustine was not happy in his love, jealousy tormented him, and he suffered from being a slave to his carnal lust. “My God Mercy,” he exclaimed, “how much gall you have mingled with my lust! He would sneak into the prison of jouissance and was soon shackled by chains of supervening bitterness,that he might be punished with the burning iron bars of jealousy and suspicion, fears, angers and quarrels. I became aware of the difference between the self-restraint of adjusted marriage and the exchange of lustful love.”
After they had lived together for a year, Augustine's concubine gave birth to a boy. They called him Adeodato, a gift from God. Patricio, however, was denied the joy of seeing his grandson.
He died in the year of Adeodato's birth. At Monica's request, he consented, on his deathbed, to receive the sacrament of baptism.
Augustine was now eighteen years old.
As a father of a family, who was in charge of a wife and a child, Augustine was eager to finish his studies as soon as possible so that he could earn a living by teaching Rhetoric. He was well qualified for this kind of work, as he had a natural gift for eloquence.
Here again the paradox characteristic of this saint's life became evident. Everything he did in his youthful years seemed to take him far from his ultimate destiny, and even his talent qualified him for anything but a career in holiness.
So that his efforts at that time tended to acquire professional skills that would enable him to stand out in the courts of law, where his task should be to give the crooked the appearance of entitlement. He strove to become a master in an art "that attracts glory to the cunning" and was fundamentally an art of deception.
When at last he obtained the degree that gave him the right to establish himself as a graduate rhetorician, he was overcome by the greed for wealth and money. "In those years," he wrote, "I taught Rhetoric, and, overcome by greed, I sold my loquacity to those who loved vanity and sought illusion."
At that time when Augustine was still completely enmeshed in sensuality, greed and vain pursuits, he nevertheless experienced, for the first time, a deep need for introspection. This was occasioned by the reading of a book, which the pagan statesman and philosopher Cicero had written nearly a century before Christ.
Reading Cicero was required by students of Rhetoric in Augustine's time. Three of his works deal with the art of rhetoric and discuss the rules that govern the most efficient use of the plans and devices of eloquence. Cicero's prose was considered a model of perfection in Latin style. As an ambitious young man who wanted to stand out, Augustine began the study of this author and, going beyond determined limits, he also read Hortensio, an essay on the value of Philosophy.
This essay by Cicero has not been preserved and we only know fragmentary quotes from it. In it the famous rhetorician Hortensius apparently held a discussion with three philosophers, one of whom was Cicero himself, Hortensius spoke in praise of Rhetoric and gave it a much higher value than than any other human achievement.
The philosophers, however, though each represented different schools of thought, were in agreement that the love of wisdom, which is Philosophy, elevates man above the level of ordinary existence and gives him incomparable superiority and happiness.
This work made a lasting impression on Augustine. "For, "as he himself said,—not to sharpen my tongue did I use that book, nor did it infuse me with its style, but rather its subject. Not as he said, but what he had to say, attracted me to your side." He suddenly recognized the baseness of his life and the vanity of things he had hitherto considered his most glorious target. “This book - he wrote - changed my mind and made me have other purposes and desires. I aspired, with an incredibly burning desire, for an immortality of wisdom.”
Augustine's impetuous decision to lead a life of greater dignity and merit thereafter remained, however, a pious wish. His search for the truth was soon again diverted by the lure of worldly vanities.

The truth of philosophical deductions could not bring about a transformation of Augustine's inner being. For this, a more powerful, deeper and more active shock would be needed. However, the uneasiness and dissatisfaction that Cicero's Hortensius planted in Augustine's soul marked at least the first preparatory step in his final conversion.
Until now Augustine had been a frivolous young man, who completely abandoned himself to his carnal instincts and urges. But now he was suddenly split in two. One half was still in her old life, while the other half looked at her with contempt. Augustine was pulled back and forth between his natural inclinations and his spiritual aspirations. He suffered from this conflict in his soul and was deeply unhappy with himself.
In his helplessness, he took from the Bible his mother Monica had given him when he left and which she had extolled as the source of all wisdom. Virgil's and Cicero's language, however, had developed in him a very demanding taste, and the crude Latin of the first translation of the Bible, the so-called Italic or Speak Version, was utterly unpleasant to him. Furthermore, the content of the Bible could not appeal to him. There was something repulsive about all those stories, the symbolic meaning of which escaped him, those eternal exhortations to chastity and purity, that insistence on humility and renunciation that he was unable to practice, and the threat that every sinner would end up in hell.
“The Holy Bible is a low-access thing,” he concluded. "To penetrate it, you would have to be no bigger than a child, or you would have to bend your head and neck well." And further on, he explained: “I wasn't one who could get into it or bend my neck.
However, it was necessary to become small. But I disdained being small and, full of pride, considered myself a great one.” So he was disappointed, and set the Bible aside. For thirteen full years I wouldn't open it again.
He began to walk in search of another doctrine of salvation that could help him bridge the gap between his life as it was and as it should have been. Trying to characterize his futile search, he said of himself: “In those years I was a wayward spirit. Hence he fell among men who were proudly blind, exceedingly carnal and loquacious. Yet they shouted: Truth!
True!... and they told me a lot about it, but the truth was not in them. They spoke and taught falsehood." In these terms the great Father of the Church later spoke of the sect of the Manicheans, in whose doctrines he had once hoped to find the answer to his quest for truth.
The founder of Manichaeism was a Persian painter named Manes. He was born in the year 215, after and according to his doctrine, he was the most perfect incarnation of Christ, a kind of personification of the Holy Spirit. It taught a strange mixture of elements drawn from the mystical dualism of Zoroaster's doctrine of light and darkness, Buddhist rules of conduct, Christian prophecies and Gnostic speculations.
All these heterogeneous ingredients, which a clear and logical thinker would never have tried to combine, blended evenly into the artist's artistic imagination. There was nothing strange to his mind about the juxtaposition of cosmological myths with biblical commandments and passages of philosophical speculation. The result of this colorful mixture of contradictory elements was a doctrine of salvation, which perfectly corresponded to the contradictory character of the young Augustine's intimate life.
Manichean dualism, with its principle of perennial struggle between the powers of light and darkness, exerted the greatest attraction on Augustine. According to Manes, it was a fight that went back to the beginning of time, when the Chief God split into the God of righteousness and light and into His adversary Satan, the representative of darkness and evil. The entire Universe took part in the struggle - the world of matter as well as man who was formed of light and darkness - and constituted a battleground for the forces of good and evil,
In all this Augustine saw an explanation of the discord in his soul, which caused him so much and so implacable sufferings. Besides, - this was even more important to me - Manes freed him from the responsibility of all his weaknesses and sins. His highest aspirations corresponded simply to the light part of his Soul and to the things that dragged him down were the fault of the darkness that was part of his existence, like everything else in the world.
The Manicheans' practical application of their doctrine was equally well suited to Augustine's state of mind at that time. Manes rejected the “brutal force of commandments” that Augustine had found so objectionable in the Bible. He was ready to make concessions to the innate frailty of human nature and divided the faithful into two classes: the "chosen", who were obliged to practice the strictest penance, and the "listeners", from whom nothing was expected to go beyond your strengths. Such a doctrine of accommodating ethics made it possible for the weakest of the weak to obtain the salvation of his soul.
As an adherent of Manichaeism Augustine returned to his hometown, planning to open a school for rhetoricians. By nature he was not devoid of self-love. He was now returning home with a degree in rhetoric; he had distinguished himself among his fellows in the great city of Carthage and, above all, he had arrived with the conviction that, as a Manichean, he had a monopoly on all forms of truth. This conviction became in him flat arrogance.
A vain professor of rhetoric and a great proselytizer of Manichean truth - this is what Augustine was when he settled again in Thagaste. His grave conduct and pretentious display of knowledge in everything he said impressed many of his acquaintances, who had previously shown themselves ready to predict the worst of the future for Patrick's son. Almost all of his former classmates have now become his students, and many of them, who were ready to receive Christian baptism, became Manicheans, thanks to his influence. There was no argument that this sharply intelligent rhetorician could not refute; there was no doubt that the convinced advocate of Manichaeism could not dispel.
Everyone from Thagas paid homage to him! All but one person: Monica! As a loving mother, she had forgiven her all the sins of her youth. But now, when her son strutted around his hometown as an arrogant apostle of Manes' heresy, his Christian zeal prevailed over his motherly love. When Augustine went so far as to try to convert her to his doctrine, his patience ran out and she showed him the front door.
Augustine was forced to move into the home of his wealthy Romanian protector.
Everyone in Tagasa listened to her famous son's lectures, but Monica remained at home, grieving over that wayward son. In his desperation, he went to Madauros, the nearest episcopal see, and, in tears, he begged the bishop for advice that would show him how to lead his stray son back to the straight path of the true faith. The old bishop heard her cries and, trying to comfort her, said to her: “Go home, and God bless you, for it is not possible that the son of such weeping will perish: Monica took these words as a prophecy . And indeed, although at first almost imperceptibly its realization began to take place shortly thereafter.
The event that put Augustine on the predestined road that would lead him away from the Manichean heresy was a spiritual shock: the painful loss of his favorite friend, who had played and went to school with him and who had also accompanied him in his Manichean aberrations. “Of true Christian faith,” confessed Augustine, “I had diverted him to those pernicious and superstitious fables for which my mother so lamented me. With me he now sinned in spirit, neither could my soul be without him.”
One day this friend fell seriously ill. During a crisis, while he seemed to be only semi-conscious of what was going on around him, he received Christian baptism. Shortly thereafter his condition improved.
“As soon as I was able to talk to him,” reports Augustine in his Confessions, “(and I was able to do so as soon as he was in a position, as I rarely left him, given the extreme affection that bound us) I tried to joke with him about that baptism he had received; while he was half-unconscious, But he recoiled trembling from me, as from an enemy, and ordered me, if I would remain his friend, to avoid such language. I was dismayed but said nothing, wanting to wait until he fully recovered his health. A few days later, in my absence, he was attacked by fever again and died.”
The loss of his friend plunged Augustine into a “delusion of pain” With a suddenness of lightning, he realized the terrible truth: that a person we loved can die, that life is ephemeral. “I felt that my soul and his soul were one soul in two bodies. And as a result, my life became a horror for me, because I could not live divided.”
Hitherto the young Augustine had lived for the pleasures of life, but now, for the first time, thanks to the grief that gripped him, when his dearest friend was taken from him, he experienced the true essence of suffering. With the fury of an elemental force, pain sank its claws into his soul, deprived him, the fanatical apostle of heresy, of all his dogmatic confidence, and left him devastated and in the most extreme confusion.
“In the face of this grief,” he wrote, “my heart was wholly darkened: all that I saw before me was death. My native country was a torment to me, and my father's house a strange misery; all that I had shared with my dear friend became unendurable torture without him. My eyes sought him everywhere, but they were not given the grace to see him; I hated everywhere, because I didn't see him in them.”
“Augustine abandoned his teaching profession in Thagaste. He fled to Carthage and sought relief from the turbulent distractions of the great city, But he found none. “Where,” he asked, “would my heart flee from my heart? Where would I run from myself? Where not to accompany myself?”
The violence of his pain taught Augustine a truth that until then had never entered his mind: the truth that there is in man something that simple reason cannot apprehend, an unconscious ego, possessed of such power, that it can give in land at a stroke with all the conclusions of reason, with all the aspirations and with all the security laboriously acquired.
Full of confusion and extreme despair, he faced this phenomenon of the unknown power of his own self, of his own soul. “I then became a great enigma to myself,” he wrote. “And I asked my soul why she was so sad, but she didn't know what to answer me.
For some time, he tried to find relief in the teachings of Manes. Manichaeism, however, this system of thought in which the entire Universe, from matter to God, was explained, which had an answer for every question, a reply for every argument, failed miserably in the face of the living phenomenon of a human soul in despair, he knew no explanation for the mystery of ego and being, no consolation for the inexpressible sadness caused by the death of a much-loved friend.
Time soothed Augustine's grief; but the question that had arisen remained unanswered. The riddle he had become to himself demanded a solution. His own self was now the fundamental problem of all his thoughts and efforts.
His restless thinking began to cast sights on other systems, in search of a solution to the problem that was not giving him peace. He immersed himself in the study of the most diverse systems of ancient philosophy. He could not find what he had decided to find, but in the course of his studies he came across several new ideas and logical deductions, which served to shake his faith in the resistance of a good number of Manichean principles.
It so happened that, just on that occasion, the famous Manichean bishop Faust went to Carthage, holding a tour of conferences. Augustine hoped that a discussion with Faust would clarify the contradictions that threatened to undermine his Manichean faith.
Faust was a self-assured rhetorician, of great skill, as long as he could follow his own train of thought, but the passionate impatience of Augustine's inquiries caused him no small embarrassment. He felt harassed by this young man, with his insatiable thirst for knowledge and his baffling “ifs” and “buts,” and finally had to admit that he could not answer the questions posed because Manes' doctrine had no answers for them.
“So all my efforts to advance in that sect have definitely come to an end,” wrote Augustine after this highly unsatisfactory interview. At that time Augustine was twenty-nine years old.
It started a new phase in its development. He returned to the teachings of the Academy, which by that time had reached a stage of complete scepticism. Academics were the spiritual heirs of the old Cynics, who had asserted that all things must be doubted and that the human mind is incapable of grasping the truth. They denied that a philosophical doctrine or belief system could hold the key to true knowledge.
Augustine had abandoned the idea of ​​finding spiritual support in any of the established systems of thought. He had nothing to stand on but his own thinking. As a skeptic, he had to go back to his own self as the basis of all his deductions. And as he began to analyze his own being, he soon discovered within himself the source of good and evil, which he had tried to discover with such passionate zeal.
While believing in Manes' dualistic doctrine that evil is the work of a dark god, Augustine had reasoned, as and even expressed himself, that “it is not we who sin, but some strange force within us. My arrogance rejoiced in being free from guilt. I'd rather apologize and accuse something else. And just that was my incurable sin, thinking I wasn't a sinner. But now I realized that, in fact, it was me, only I who sinned."
This, however, was only a first step. What followed was proof that the free choice of man's will makes him an independent agent in deciding between good and evil.
“What lifted me up to the light,” wrote Augustine, “was knowing very well that I had a free will, as I knew I lived. So when I wanted or didn't want something, I was pretty sure that none other than myself wanted it or didn't want it, and I found it more and more clearly that there was the cause of the sin.
knowledge that the origin of good and evil lies in the human soul was the beginning of what we call consciousness. In the development of Augustine it marked the most important step forward.
In complete contrast to $. Antony, for whom good and evil were external forces that took the form of angels and demons, Augustine knew now that both good and evil, both right and wrong, had their roots in man himself. In Antony's case, the struggle against the power of darkness took place in tombs and caves—in Augustine's case, in the invisible realm of the human soul. Antony fought evil by exorcising the devil; Augustine's weapon was wisdom and knowledge!
Not a century separated the two saints. And yet what a tremendous change was wrought in man's struggle for perfection! What had seemed to be a problem in the outside world was now a problem in the man's own soul.
In the early centuries of the Christian era, spiritual tendencies were largely determined by the thought and deeds of the saints.
The transition from Antony to Augustine thus signifies a definitive transition in the spiritual history of the West: from a state of unconsciousness the human soul had awakened to the full certainty of its own reality.
The life of S. Antao - despite its strange setting of caves and tombs in the desert, despite demonic apparitions and excessive asceticism - presents itself with perfectly clear contours to modern thought. The life of St. Augustine, on the other hand, remains strangely problematic, although his surroundings are much more familiar and although his difficulties and complications are of a kind so generally human. The course of Augustine's life is marked by insoluble contradictions. His outward events are a series of seemingly aimless incompatibilities. However, the fact that exerts the most complete pressure on the confusion of Augustine's desk is the extraordinary nature of his mental development, which stands in sharp contrast to his experiences and his conduct,in this which follows a perfectly straight and clear line, which takes you despite occasional missteps-to the highest peaks of human thought.
At the age of thirty-three, Augustine's mental development and his outer life progressed on two different planes, which had nothing in common. His thought followed his upward trend, as if he were fully certain of his ultimate goal, and all the while the external events of his career were moving along the sinuous line of lowest mediocrity. Although in the course of his spiritual development he reached the most decisive conclusions of ethics and morality, his own life, conduct, and actions remained totally free from its influence. For decades the inquiring soul of Augustine, and Augustine the vainglorious rhetorician, lived as two separate beings with no interest in each other or even open hostility.
After his conversation with Faust, Augustine recognized that Manichaeism was a futile illusion. However, he did not draw consequences from this knowledge for his own actions. For years he continued as a member of the Manichaean sect. He attended their meetings, made use of his Manichean friends, when they could help him in his career.
Encouraged by his Manichean friends, who could provide him with excellent letters of introduction, he now decided to leave Africa and try his luck in the capital of the empire. The biggest obstacle standing in the way of this plane was Augustine's mother Monica, whose fears for her wayward son had made her accompany him to Carthage. When he learned of his decision, he begged him to stay with her in Carthage, for he could not bear the thought that, in distant Rome, he could live entirely outside his maternal influence.
Indifferent to her tears and her despair, Augustine decided to deceive her. On the night of his departure, she accompanied him to the port, but he assured her that he had to go aboard only to say goodbye to a friend who was leaving for Rome. He managed to convince her that she should wait for him in the church of S. Cipriano, nearby. She spent the night there in prayer, desperately waiting for her son, whose ship, meanwhile, had left Africa, sailing at full power to the continent of Europe. In the morning Monica left the church and went to the port to see how cruelly her deluded son had been.
In Rome Augustine's fortune-hunting continued, under changed conditions, but without greater success. His high hopes, because of which he had deceived his mother, were not fulfilled. His entire adventure in Rome remained under the sign of an evil star. Shortly after his arrival, he fell ill with what seems to have been a kind of malaria. For weeks, he bordered between life and death, Helpless and without financial means, he was completely dependent on the charity of a Manichean, who had received him as a confrere of his religious sect. After he recovered his health, Augustine opened a school of Rhetoric, but it was a complete failure. He managed to enroll numerous students, but when it came time for payment, they were all gone.
At that time Rome was a rich city. The streets were lined with marble palaces and a golden gate stood beside the other. Agostinho, however, a professor of rhetoric, lived in poor neighborhoods, close to Monte Aventino.
After a very short time, he began to think again about moving somewhere. He thought of Milan as the most promising field for his work. Rome, in fact, was the capital of the empire, but the focal point of Western social life was Milan, for that was where the emperor had his residence.
Unexpectedly favorable circumstances made it possible for Augustine to carry out his plan sooner than he had expected.
It so happened that the Roman prefect Symachus, head of a powerful pagan faction, had arrived from the court in Milan with orders to seek out in Rome a good rhetorician, qualified to assume the magisterium of Rhetoric in the imperial residence.

How little were Augustine's Manichean protectors aware of his inner apostasy, can be inferred from the fact that they weighed all their influence on Symachus in order to induce him to give place in Milan to his co-religionist in Thagaste.
Symachus, head of the pagan party, was in good spirits in favor of all anti-Christian sects. He sent for the young rhetorician and was so impressed and pleased with his familiarity with pagan literature that he dispatched him immediately to Milan with the warmest recommendations and at the expense of the state.
As a protégé of the Roman prefect, Augustine was welcomed with open arms by high society and cordially welcomed at the imperial court. Milan really seemed to open up for him the glorious career he had long dreamed of.
Referring to this period of his life, Augustine wrote in his Confessions: "My miserable and sinful youth had passed and I had come to maturity, yet the farther I advanced in years, the greater became my shameful nothingness."
But it was here in Milan that Augustine's conversion to Christianity would finally take place. It was in Milan that he received Christian baptism from St. Ambrose, bishop of that diocese.
The names of St. Augustine and St. Ambrose were destined to shine in history as the names of the first great "Doctors of the Church". Their first encounter, however, was entirely cold and impersonal.
'The motive which induced Augustine to visit Ambrose was not at all his interest in Christian teachings, but rather the attempt to establish himself in the good graces of the most powerful man in Milan, if not in the entire Western empire. Ambrose, the first statesman among the bishops of the Christian West, had been, from the beginning of Gratian's government, the adviser to the Christian emperors and had held the most influential position at the court of Milan.
The bishop received his visitor with cordiality and benevolence.
But cordiality and benevolence were simply manifestations of Ambrose's nature. His episcopal office was accessible to everyone.
Anyone who had a request to make could enter unannounced. As oppressive as the load of his work might be, this Church dignitary always found time to listen to the requests and complaints of his numerous visitors. In the case of Augustine, however, there was a certain unmistakable reserve. This restless young African, who had arrived as a protégé of the pagan chief Simaco, and who, moreover, had a reputation for being a Manichean, did not impress the bishop very favorably. As Augustine's visits became more and more frequent, he came to regard them as a real nuisance. Sometimes, when Augustine entered, the bishop was absorbed in his reading. So he didn't allow himself any interruption and continued what he was doing, paying no attention to his visitor. Augustine was there,in the greatest embarrassment. He tried to say something, but there was nothing to encourage him. Ambrose didn't even look up, and at last Agostinho was slipping away, without seeming to have even been noticed.
Despite Ambrose's coolness, Augustine felt increasingly strongly attracted to the holy bishop. It was the typical Roman who fascinated him in Ambrose, for throughout his career, which had taken him from the post of consular prefect to make him pastor of Christianity, Ambrose had maintained the imposing attitude, freedom and natural security of a Roman from noble lineage. Nothing could have impressed the restless and disordered young African more deeply than the serene poise of that patrician.
“I began to like him,” wrote Augustine, referring to Ambrose, “at first, not as a teacher of truth, for at that time I was not looking for the truth in the Church.” He saw the bishop as an ideal worthy of emulation. The fact that Ambrose lived a celibate life shocked him, he wrote, as a "painful method."
Every Sunday Ambrose preached a sermon in the basilica in Milan. His reputation and the power of his eloquence made those sermons one of the important events in the life of the city. Every Sunday Augustine went to hear the bishop's preaching. Ambrose spoke like a Christian bishop, but the clarity of his thought and the precision of his language showed that he had followed the school of Cicero, Theophrastus, and all the other great writers of ecclesiastical antiquity. Like few others, he mastered the rhetorical devices of realistic description, allegorical interpretation, and even caustic satire.
“I listened avidly,” explained Augustine, “not with the veneration I owed him, but simply to judge his eloquence. And so I soaked in his way of expression, but I didn't pay attention to what he said, and I didn't even care about it. But in the end, together with the words that plunged into me, their content and meaning penetrated into my thought”. His experience was again what it had been in the case of Cicero's Hortensius. The formal beauty induced him to pay attention also to the meaning it contained.
In Ambrose's interpretation, the most contradictory passages in the Bible so clearly and beautifully impressed Augustine, because he had learned to take them, not literally, but to grasp their allegorical truth.
And yet he said, referring to this period, that Christian truth “was within and I was without. It was beyond space, but I still clung to things in space. And so the lowest things rose above me and dragged me down”.
Before going to Milan, Augustine had devoted his whole life to vanity, ambition and pleasure. Now, when fame and success seemed definitely within reach, he lost all embarrassment and sense of shame. He flattered whoever he had reason to consider a potential patron of influence. As a rhetorician, he produced panegyrics on demand and mixed the right and wrong, with great skill, to serve his clients' ends.
“I now had beautifully fat lace. However, he was not alone in the company of his concubine and his son Adeodato. His mother Monica and his younger brother Navígio also lived with him. So he was in charge of five people and this, together with his pompous social ambitions, required a good deal of money.
Each success or greater added fuel to his ardent ambition. He dreamed of great wealth and influential position.
What he aspired to was nothing less than the post of presiding judge in Milan, with sufficient fees to enable him to acquire and maintain a large estate in the countryside.
To facilitate his career, he thought that marriage to a girl from a wealthy and noble family would be desirable. The only obstacle in the way of such a plan was the presence of his concubine, a girl of poor and low kinship. She had been his faithful companion for over sixteen years, had borne him a son, but now, goaded by her inordinate ambition, he had simply shipped her back to her home in Africa, not even allowing her the consolation of her son's company. A short time later, he arranged for marriage to a girl from one of the best families in Milan. He
had reason to expect a handsome dowry from her.
The girl was only twelve years old and the nuptial ceremony would have to be postponed for two years. Since, however, as he confessed to his friends, that he was incapable of spending a night without a wife, he took another mistress immediately after the departure. of Melanie.
He was now Milan's most sought-after rhetorician and, in due course, the highest honor would be bestowed upon him. The chief chamberlain, in agreement with the chief of the army, commissioned him to write the panegyric of Emperor Valentinian II on his thirteenth birthday, which he was to read in person, as part of a program of court ceremonies. Augustine knew, as well as anyone else in the empire, that the young emperor was a totally insignificant boy, a mere puppet in the hands of his dominating mother Justina. But that wasn't enough to stop him from composing a masterful compliment.
He felt completely delusional with pride and delight. However, his exuberance was interrupted, for a brief moment, by a serious and quite significant experience: the spectacle of another human being in a state of intoxication. Accompanied by his friends, he was on his way to the imperial palace, where he was to make his speech, when he met, in a hidden alley, a beggar who was thoroughly drunk and who, in his drunkenness, seemed to be enjoying the most complete satisfaction. Augustine stopped for a moment and, observing the crazy behavior of the happy beggar, said to his friends: “Look at him and see how he rejoices carelessly. Do we not only want to attain that full joy that that beggar reached before us? And perhaps we will never reach it, for what he obtained, thanks to a few beggars,I myself am planning to do it, through rather tedious roundabouts and intricacies. I am certainly better educated than he is, but knowledge does not give me the joy he discovers in wine, and what do I do with my knowledge? Do I use it to instruct men, or simply to please the mighty and the multitudes, to earn money and exceedingly foolish honors? Even now I am publicly on my way to appearing as a paid praiser.to earn money and extremely silly honors? Even now I am publicly on my way to appearing as a paid praiser.to earn money and extremely silly honors? Even now I am publicly on my way to appearing as a paid praiser.
This same night the beggar will enjoy his drunkenness and will wake up with a clear head. But I, drunk with boasting, will sleep with her and I will get up with her for days on end.”
What poignant self-analysis! However, he exhausted himself in this tirade addressed to his friends and did not exceed the duration of a moment. Augustine did not turn back. He walked straight to the palace and began his eulogy, “full of lies, so that the liar might win the favor of those who knew his lies.
So things went on for a long time. With his intelligence, Augustine recognized the bleak vileness of his life but despite this knowledge he did not interrupt his vain and useless existence, “Often,” he later wrote, of this time, “I paid attention to what I had become and I found I was in a bad way, It grieved my heart, but it would only make me redouble my iniquity and my shame.”
And yet, at last, he managed to rise from the depths of iniquity and shame to the heights of glory and perfection. Introspection, the knowledge of his own soul, led him to the knowledge of the entire existence and raised him not only to the plane of holiness, but made him one of the most important thinkers in the Western world. Antony, its ascetic precursor, attained sanctity through renunciation; Augustine achieved through the strength of his intelligence. In Antony's case, God revealed himself to a soul strong in faith; in the case of Augustine, He finally answered the search for a man who had been looking for Him, long before he met him or even found the entrance to His kingdom.
Because Augustine, the “merchant of words”, the unbridled fortune-hunter of Milan, was possessed of the deepest and most incorruptible power of introspection. His deep insight had been too often and too long enslaved by the lowest instincts of his nature, but despite all this the passionate search for true understanding persisted, intact and undaunted, in his mind. And even more than that! His passion for understanding drew strength from his failures and the fragility of his physical nature. The mysterious force that could induce Augustine to act badly, in the face of what he knew to be best, became for him a problem that would never again give him peace.
“I already knew,” he wrote, “that we have the freedom to choose between good and evil,” and he continued to describe the desperate struggle he had to wage within his soul. “Seeking to take my eyes off the spirit of that well, I was plunged into it again, and as many times as I tried, as many times as I would be plunged into it again. But when I rose proudly, the lesser things were placed above me and exerted pressure on me, and nowhere was there relief or room to breathe. They afflicted my sight on all sides, in multitudes and hordes, and in thought the images of bodies intruded as I turned to You, as if to say to me: “Where are you going, unworthy and lowly creature? And these things had sprung from my thinking. And it lifted me up to Your light, which I knew so had a will,how much to have life. When, therefore, I was willing or unwilling to do something, I was more than certain that it was no one but myself who was willing and unwilling; but of what I was doing against my will I was equally certain, I suffered before I did it and thought that it would not be my fault but my punishment, and quickly confessed to myself that my punishment would not be unjust. But he said again: “Where does this desire to do evil come from me and this refusal to do good? Who put this inside me and planted the root of bitterness in me?” With these reflections I was once again brought down and suffocated.”but of what I was doing against my will I was equally certain, I suffered before I did it and thought that it would not be my fault but my punishment, and quickly confessed to myself that my punishment would not be unjust. But he said again: “Where does this desire to do evil come from me and this refusal to do good? Who put this inside me and planted the root of bitterness in me?” With these reflections I was once again brought down and suffocated.”but of what I was doing against my will I was equally certain, I suffered before I did it and thought that it would not be my fault but my punishment, and quickly confessed to myself that my punishment would not be unjust. But he said again: “Where does this desire to do evil come from me and this refusal to do good? Who put this inside me and planted the root of bitterness in me?” With these reflections I was once again brought down and suffocated.”
Augustine's friends played a decisive role in his development. The grief that the loss of a dear friend had caused him had been the starting point of his introspection. Now again an experience, in which his friends played the main part, enabled him to broaden his knowledge of his own soul and to move towards a higher form of wisdom, Because in exchanging ideas with his friends, Augustine came to recognize that the problem of the origin of evil, which so preoccupied him, was a problem of humanity in general, the greatest human problem of all time.

"We lived together as friends and often had occasion to exchange our dark ideas about the origin of evil," wrote Augustine, referring in particular to his companions Alipius and Nebridius. These two had been faithful to him from the beginning. Alypius had joined him in Thagaste and Nebridius in Carthage.
His intellectual superiority had fascinated them to such an extent that they had followed him in all things, through all his devious errors, right down to his latest ethical analyses. Every word from their idol had the value of a revelation to them. However, while Augustine seemed to be content with simply intellectually detaining the solution of their problems, they, for their part, did their best to adopt his wisdom as a model for their actions and conduct in daily life. This procedure of theirs showed Augustine the vast abyss which separates man's knowledge from his conduct. Here he saw two young men who tried to be good and do well to the best of their ability and who, nevertheless, wavered and were occasionally plunged into evil.
Something that happened to Alípio showed Augustine, with blinding clarity, what the force of evil is capable of. Alipio had been a passionate fan of the circus. His greatest delight had been the gladiatorial fights. But now, under the influence of Augustine, he tried to fight his passion for the circus and avoided anything that might rekindle it in his soul. Then one day it happened, as Augustine described the event in his Confessions, “that Alipius came across certain acquaintances of his and fellow students returning from dinner. And they, with familiar violence, took him, despite his refusal and his resistance, to the amphitheater, during the course of those deadly entertainments. Again and again he protested "Although you drag my body over there and feel me there,you cannot force me to turn my sight or mind to those horrors. I will therefore be absent, even if present in body, and thus I will triumph both with you and with them.” Hearing this, they carried him there nevertheless. But he, closing his eyes, prevented his spirit from escaping... and it would have been good if he had also covered his ears, for when someone fell in the fight, a thunderous clamor from the crowd shook him so strongly that, overcome by curiosity, he opened his ears. eyes And as soon as he saw that blood, he immediately became drunk with ferocity, did not turn, but fixed his eyes on him, shuddered suddenly, and was delighted with the loathsome struggle, drunk with bloody amusement."closing his eyes, he prevented his spirit from escaping... and it would have been good if he had also covered his ears, for when in the fight someone fell, a thunderous clamor from the crowd shook him so strongly that, overcome by curiosity, he opened his eyes And so then he saw that blood, at once drunk with ferocity, did not turn, but fixed his eyes on it, shuddered suddenly, and was delighted with the loathsome struggle, drunk with bloody amusement."closing his eyes, he prevented his spirit from escaping... and it would have been good if he had also covered his ears, for when someone fell in the fight, a thunderous clamor from the crowd shook him so strongly that, overcome by curiosity, he opened his eyes. then he saw that blood, at once drunk with ferocity, did not turn, but fixed his eyes on it, shuddered suddenly, and was delighted with the loathsome struggle, drunk with bloody amusement."and he was delighted with the loathsome struggle, drunk with bloody amusement."and he was delighted with the loathsome struggle, drunk with bloody amusement."
Describing his discussions with his two devoted friends, Augustine wrote: “We were three beggars who gathered together to hear each other's lamentations. And as we wondered about the purpose and meaning of things, despite the bitterness that resulted from our worldly deeds, we found darkness without any light. How much longer would we remain trapped inside?
We asked this question many times, but it didn't change our lives, because we hadn't found security to cling to, abandoning our trust in everything else.”
What kept Augustine in this state of confusion was the fact that his thought continued to wander idly, within the narrow confines of materialistic views. This made it impossible for him to conceive of the existence of a purely spiritual world. “I could not,” he would say, “think of anything as real a, other than what my mortal eyes perceived. Even of God I could not think otherwise than in human form, still as a physical being, infinite in extension and filling the space of the world. So heavy was my spirit, so lacking in clarity and light, that I esteemed idle and vain what had no extension in space and could not be seen in a body. Consequently, the nature of evil remained hidden from me.”
Augustine owed his emancipation from the clutches of materialism to the writings of the Neoplatonists, which were recommended to him by some of his philosopher friends in Milan. The most source impression was that which he received from Plotinus' Enneads, a book accessible in the Latin translation of the famous Mario Vitoriano. The Neoplatonic doctrine of "logos", the "eternal word" that is God, taught him to accept the truth that is not embodied in matter; made it possible for him to understand the spiritual essence of all created things. In light of this Neoplatonic view, he also recognized the divine homogeneity of good and evil; he understood that evil is not an independent force, that it has no existence of its own, but is the product of an error of volition, the result of a will that deviated from the supreme Being.
But if the Neoplatonic doctrine taught him the reality of an eternal spiritual truth, it has not yet given him the energy to change his way of life. His theoretical denial of evil was not a straight road he could follow. What was lacking in the writings of the Neoplatonists was practical advice on what a weak human being should do in order to master his frailty.
Commenting on this point, Augustine wrote: “In all those pages nothing was said about the sacrifice of a contrite heart, a troubled spirit, the salvation of the people, and the cup of our redemption. Nobody heard there calling: “Come to me all who work. For it is one thing from the wooded top of the mountain to see the land of peace and not find the way to it, to try impassable paths, and another to keep to the path that leads to it, guarded by the hosts of the celestial general So I sought the way but I did not find him, until I embraced that “Mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus”, calling me and saying to me: “I am the way, the truth and the life.
What Neoplatonism presented simply as a sublime doctrine took on in Christianity the form of a living and active reality. The "logos", the "eternal word", had taken flesh in Christ. He who could believe in Him, who could accompany Him and see in Him the tangible embodiment of a purely spiritual essence, had reached a point where the attainment of pure spirit and of God was possible.
Neoplatonism showed Augustine the path that leads to the "homeland of bliss", but it was Christianity that taught him to "dwell in it". He who had once spoken so contemptuously of Holy Scripture that he had called it a children's book now recognized that it contained the highest truth, that "God had kept it hidden from the wise and revealed it to the simple and innocent."
The epistles of St. Paul were finally the key that opened to Augustine's understanding the truths of Christian doctrine. He immersed himself in the study of those letters and found that they were written by a man who knew, by real experience, the transforming power of the spirit.
After this, events of internal and external importance occurred, in quick succession, razing the thinker Augustine, deeply immersed in Paul's writings, ever more strongly into the orbit of Christian teachings.
It was mainly due to the influence of Bishop Ambrose that Augustine's attention was more fully focused on the positive values ​​of Christianity. Hitherto Augustine had admired in Ambrose the Roman virtues of an influential Church dignitary and the supreme rhetorical skill, but Ambrose's heroic attitude in the face of renewed Christian persecutions, initiated by Justina, mother of the emperor, demonstrated his irresistible strength. that true Christian faith can communicate to its faithful. The struggle that flared up between the Arian empress and the Orthodox bishop was an event that, for days, brought all Milan into breathless excitement. The fact that Monica, wholeheartedly at the bishop's side, was involved in the conflict naturally increased Augustine's interest in what was happening.
The empress had completely fallen under the influence of the Aryans and demanded that a church in Milan be set aside for the use of her favorite sect. Bishop Ambrose, as the representative of orthodox Christianity, steadfastly refused to comply with the empress's request. Confident of her imperial authority, Justina decided to settle the case by issuing a decree in the emperor's name. Ambrose refused to obey, as he felt he represented a power greater than the Roman Empire. He was the representative of the kingdom of God. In her anger, the empress resorted to force and sent a detachment of soldiers against the reluctant bishop.
On the critical morning when imperial soldiers were ordered to seize the church for the Aryans, the bishop ordered his flock to attend an early mass in the basilica. Monica, one of Ambrose's most faithful supporters, was present and it was she who reported to Augustine what happened in the basilica.
The church was full. The bishop, standing at the pulpit, was reading a lesson from the Bible. Suddenly, a man rushed in and shouted excitedly: "The soldiers are coming!" Now the marching footsteps of the soldiers could be clearly heard. But Ambrose was not disturbed. He continued with his sermon. I was reading an excerpt from the book of Job, explaining the great suffering that the Lord had imposed on the man Ceiling, to experience the strength of endurance of his faith.
The soldiers had been ordered to lay siege to the basilica until the bishop and his flock capitulated. But Ambrose would rather die than leave the house of the Lord to heretics. He remained at his post.
The faithful had simply gone to attend mass early. They had not brought food and the basilica was so overcrowded that there was no place for anyone to lie down and rest. The day passed, and when night fell, not only the bodies of the faithful but also their prayers had grown weary. Only thanks to a great effort could the faithful maintain themselves. Something should be done to comfort them. Then the bishop's voice was heard in a hymn. The distressing situation for him and his faithful, the coming of night, the dimly lit basilica, the soldiers outside and the faithful inside, the belief that the truth of Christ was at stake, all this, but above all the belief of the truth of Christ, ascended in the rhythms of the hymn of Ambrose. It was sublimely solemn and yet simple and familiar, like a popular street song, and everyone in the basilica, man,woman or child, were able to sing it in chorus:
"God, who created all that exists,
that the" heavens governs and that the days clothe with light,
and at night you give the Benefit of sleep,
which the weak senses make capable of making new efforts,
of anguish, relieving the thought and calming the tumult of sorrows,
Permit, when the shadow around us creeps and envelops everything in dense darkness, that faith has neither night nor sadness, and from its brightness new light breaks in.
Will and firm heart,
sleep not, sleep ye thoughts of impiety ,
Come faith dominate the burning seductions of torpor and lust.
Free me, Lord, from the traps of the senses,
and make sure I dream,
within the heart, only with you
May the idle enemy not be able to disturb my rest with fear."

The entire church rumbled to the sound of the hymn. Danger and deprivation were forgotten. The fatigue of body and soul disappeared. There was nothing else in the basilica but the firm belief in the divinity of Christ, and this belief, this unshakable faith, continued to sing through the night.
At dawn the next day, the soldiers still had the basilica surrounded, but the first rays of the rising sun, falling obliquely through the narrow windows of the church, inspired the bishop with a new morning hymn. It was a song that gave the faithful the strength to persist in prayer and its constancy:
“The splendor of the shining glory of God,
You whose light haunts the light,
light of light, who are the living source of light,
day that All days light up...
Morning arrives in your pink car.
Come Lord, our perfect morning.
Come the Word of God, the only Father, and let us
praise, in the Son, the perfect Father."

Then Ambrose divided his faithful into several choirs and had them sing his hymns in alternating male and female voices. And all the faithful were as one, in their desire to sing the praises of God as perfectly, as beautifully as they could. And as the day wore on, four of Ambrose's best hymns, four of the most magnificent hymns of the Christian Church, were composed by the bishop and learned and sung over and over by the faithful, inside the Milan basilica, which the imperial soldiers had kept under siege. . Such were the beginnings of the great gifts to culture in the Western world, which came to be known as Ambrosian hymnology.
Two days and two nights passed. On the morning of the third day, when the bishop and his flock still refused to submit to the empress's demands, Justina ordered her soldiers to take the basilica by storm. The doors were forced, just as the faithful were singing another antiphonal hymn that Ambrose had composed for them. The choir of deep male voices responded to the theme given by the soft voices of women and children. When the soldiers saw and heard the flock of faithful of Ambrose, against whom they had come to drive them out of their Church, they stopped, laid down their swords, whose tinkling might disturb the solemnity of the hymn, and, as one man, they fell from knees singing the praises of Christ in whom God had assumed human form, as taught by Ambrose and denied by Justina.
The power of swords had lost to the power of song. At the same time, however, the Christian Church of the Western world had acquired a new weapon, the gospel of hymns, whose power of melody and rhythm was exerted on the souls of men and women everywhere, winning them to the cause of Christ. From these beginnings of Ambrosian hymnology, centuries later, the grandeur and strength of Gregorian sacred music developed.
In St. Paul's Christology, Augustine's inquiring spirit had finally discovered the answer to his quest for truth. Now the prodigal son was ready to return to his mother, for her inspired words of faith no longer impressed him as "woman's babble." The prophecy of the old bishop of Madauros would come true. "The child of such tears cannot perish."
As a disobedient boy, and later as the esteemed rhetorician, Augustine was held in such high esteem that he paid no attention to what his mother said. Now, a mature man, he had acquired childlike humility, to listen to her. He was deeply shaken when he heard from Monica the narration of what he had felt during those three days spent with Ambrose's flock in the besieged basilica. It is Augustine's heart united with hers, in flaming admiration for the heroic bishop, possessed of firm faith, capable of instilling the highest form of courage and trust in the human heart.
The hymns, which owed their existence to the troubled days of the siege, gave greater strength to Augustine's union in faith with his mother. What had prevented Augustine for so long from sympathizing with the spirit of Christianity was, above all, the rigidity of its ethical demands. In Ambrose's hymns he heard for the first time the conciliatory smoothness of a simple and fervent trust in God. These hymns, moreover, indulged her sense of formal perfection and classical beauty, through rhythm and melody. However, if he was truly overwhelmed by their solemn grandeur, it was first of all because he felt in them an element absent from the most perfect works of the ancients, not only from their music, but from their art in general and even from the greatest achievements of their philosophers. There was no clear term to designate it,but it was something that could speak directly to the human soul, which could comfort the heartbroken and had the power to promise redemption to those plunged into the deepest despair. It was the function of this art to comfort the soul of man, to soothe and heal the wounds of his heart.
In his Confessions, Augustine described the impression that Ambrose's hymns made on him when he first heard them, beside Monica, in the Milan basilica. “How often have I cried,” he wrote, “listening to those hymns and songs, played to the depths of my soul by the sweet chorus of voices! They flowed into my ears and the truth, instilled in my chest, awakened in me the love of devotion.
The decision to start a new life in Christ was ripe in Augustine's soul. Executing it, however, implied the prompt performance of great sacrifices. He would have to master his old self, practice chastity, forget about success and fame, and abandon all the sweet indulgences of a life of comfort and ease. Weakness of heart and fear prevented him from taking the decisive step.
As a master of psychological exposition, Augustine described the struggle his spirit had to wage against “the inertia of his heart”, against “the reluctance of the flesh” and against “the resistance of his habits.” He wrote: “I felt sick and tormented, accusing me far more severely than was my custom, tossing and twisting in my chains, until I felt completely enraptured, chains by which, now only lightly, I was still attached. Ah! let it be done now, let it be done now!" And when I spoke, I almost reached a resolution. I almost took it but I didn't. However I didn't fall back into my old condition, but it put me close and took my breath. less and then almost touched and grabbed her; and yet it did not reach her,neither touched it nor picked it up, hesitating to die in death to live in life; and the worst, to which I had been used, prevailed more with me than the best, which I had not tried. And just as I was about to become another man, the closer he came to me, the greater the horror that penetrated me; but it did not force me to refuse, nor to go astray, but it kept me suspended.”
“All the trifles of trifles, and vanities of vanities, my old lovers, still dragged me; they shook my fleshly garments and whispered under their breath, “Will you part with us? And from that moment on, we won't be with you forever? And from that moment on, will this or that no longer be lawful, in your view, forever? And what did they suggest with the words “this or that? What a world of impurities they suggested! What a shame! And now I was barely listening to them, not openly showing and contradicting me, but muttering, as it were, behind my back and furtively pulling me as I walked away to force me to look back to they, Yet slowed me down so that I hesitated to break through and divest myself of them and jump to where I was called, hearing an unbridled habit say to me:"You think you can live without them" But now I was saying this weakly, for from that side to which I had my face turned and to which I was afraid to go, the chaste dignity of Continence appeared to me, pleasant but not dissolutely cheerful, honestly inviting following her, without doubting anything, and extending her holy hands, full of a multiplicity of good examples, to receive and embrace me. And she smiled at me, with an encouraging sneer, as if to say, “Can't you do what those others can? Or can one or the other do it for themselves and not before in the Lord their God? The Lord their God delivered me to them. Why do you trust in your own strength and thus cannot maintain yourself? Thou hast cast upon Them; fear not that He will withdraw His support from you and make you so fall; rest upon Him without fear, He will receive you and heal you.” And I blushed,beyond measure, for I still heard the murmur of those trifles and remained in abeyance.”
By his own energies he would not have been able to find a way out of that dead end. He needed a guiding hand to lead him out of his uncertain wavering state. With this in mind, he went to see an old priest named Simplitian, who many years ago had initiated the Roman prefect Ambrose into the dogmas of the Christian faith. To him Augustine confessed his carnal aberrations and his spiritual conflicts, asking him for advice and help.
It is a frequent observation that a seemingly unimportant detail, a fortuitous allusion, a casual phrase, can often determine the entire future course of a human life. This is what happened in the case of Augustine. In the course of his conversation with Simplitian, he talked about the books that had influenced his thinking and, among others, he mentioned the Victorian translation of the Encadas of Plotinus.
"Vitoriano, Mario Vitoriano—interrupted the old priest—I know him very well! I baptized him!
And he told Augustine the story of Victoriano's conversion to the Christian faith. He
was a man of African kinship. One of the most celebrated pagan and rhetorical authors The city of Rome honored him by erecting his statue in the Forum of Trajan, still alive.
At the height of his career, he began to study the Christian Bible, only because he wanted to refute its principles in another of his brilliant essays. But what happened was that the things he had set out to refute cast their fascination upon him, until he could no longer resist the burning desire to become a Christian himself and fight, with all his might, for the cause of Christian truth. He went to Simpliciano and asked him to baptize him. In accordance with the custom of baptism was a public ceremony and had to be preceded by the candidate's abjuration of his old religion, making him solemn confession of his new creed, Simplician was ready to dispense with the famous rhetorician, pride of contemporary pagan philosophy. , of this embarrassing public confession. But Victorian did not want to accept such special favors.“I have spoken so many empty and false words in public,” he declared, “that there is no reason for me to hide now that I profess the truth.” And he boldly confessed his new faith in front of a huge crowd of people.
Augustine was deeply affected by this story. It sounded in his ears like an exhortation. A heathen rhetorician, whose heathen knowledge had brought him the highest honors and distinctions, having come to the conclusion that what he taught was false, that the real truth lay in faith in Christ, had not hesitated to forsake the greater glory than a rhetoric may strike during your lifetime. He, Augustine, had come to the same conclusion, but he had not had the courage to draw the same consequence from it. His success as a rhetorician was nothing compared to what Victorian had been called to sacrifice. And yet he continued to waver!
A short time later, Augustine was talking one afternoon with his friend Alypius, when he received an unexpected visit from his compatriot Pontician, who occupied an important position at court.
Entering the room, he saw Ponticiano, with great admiration, on top of the card table where Augustine and his friends were about to start a game of dice, a copy of St. Paul's epistles. Pontician was a Christian and so it was natural for the conversation to turn to the subject of the Christian creed. In the course of the debate, Pontician spoke of the life of the strange hermit, St. Anthony of Egypt.
“Augustine was fascinated by the story of the son of the modest farmer, whom a simple quote from the Bible, overheard in church, had induced to abandon all his earthly goods, master his carnal appetites and spend his entire future life in austerity and in renunciation, in order to obey I will here stop the laws of Christ. He felt deeply ashamed. The son of a simple farmer had needed only a single sentence of the Gospel to begin his new life; and he, the wise teacher, whom the study of Paul's writings had convinced of the truth of Christ's teachings, he who for more than two years had heard every Sunday the most eloquent bishop of the Church interpret the meaning of the Gospel, he continued to waver and postpone the beginning of the new life that he had recognized as true.
Augustine's confusion became completely unbearable when his visitor told him about two of his friends, high court dignitaries, who had read Athanasius' Vita St. Antonii and were so deeply shaken by it that they did not hesitate a moment of abandoning their lucrative positions and exchanging all the joys of their worldly lives for a life of ascetic austerities emulating the example set by the holy farmer of Coma.
As soon as the visitor left, Augustine turned to his friend Alypius and exclaimed, in a whirlwind of shame and bitter self-accusation: “What shall we do now? Don't you see? The ignorant jumped up and took the sky by force, and we, with all our knowledge, continued to linger. High court dignitaries abandon everything and start a new life, but we persist in our lives of iniquity and filth.”
Disgust with himself filled his heart and threatened to choke him.
Once again his old self mustered all his strength for a definitive permanence. It was the ultimate struggle of flesh against soul, of pleasure against the highest aspirations. In frantic excitement, she tore out her hair, covered her eyes, and burst into a burst of tears: “Oh! Sir, how much longer? How much longer? Tomorrow, always tomorrow! Why not today? Why not now? Why doesn't this true hour end my misery?”
The time had come for his conversion. What happened to his soul during this crisis of his life was described by him in one of the most impressive passages of his Confessions: “Now that a deep reflection had, from the secret depths of my soul, dragged and piled up all my misery , before the sight of my heart, a tremendous storm was unleashed in me. I got up and ran to the garden, moving away from Alipio, as the garden suggested to me that solitude was the best thing for me to cry. It happened to me on that occasion and he noticed it, because I believe that I had said something, in which the sound of my voice seemed shaken by tears, and in that state I had stood up. Then he remained where we had been sitting, filled with the most complete amazement. I ran — how, I don't know — under a certain fig tree,giving free rein to my tears, and the torrents of tears from my eyes gushed an acceptable sacrifice for Thee.
“I was crying, in the bitterest contrition of my heart, when there I heard the voice of a boy or a girl, I don't know how to specify, coming from a neighboring house, singing and repeating many times: “Take it and read it; pick it up and read it!" My attitude immediately changed and I began to consider, in all seriousness, whether it was customary for children, in any kind of game, to sing such words. Nor did I remember ever hearing similar words. So, suppressing the flood of my tears, I rose, interpreting those words as a command from Heaven that I should open the book and read the first chapter that came to my sight, for I had known that Antao, by chance entering the church , at the moment the Gospel was read, he received the warning, as if what was being read was addressed to him:“Go sell all that you have and give it to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come follow me; And with this oracle he was immediately converted to Thee. So I hurriedly returned to the place where Alipius was sitting, for there I had left the volume of the apostles when he had left thence. I grabbed the book, opened it, and silently read the paragraph on which my eyes first fell: 'Not in debauchery and drunkenness, not in lust and lust, not in strife and envy; but trust in Our Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh to satisfy sensuality.when he left there. I grabbed the book, opened it, and silently read the paragraph on which my eyes first fell: 'Not in debauchery and drunkenness, not in lust and lust, not in strife and envy; but trust in Our Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh to satisfy sensuality.when he left there. I grabbed the book, opened it, and silently read the paragraph on which my eyes first fell: 'Not in debauchery and drunkenness, not in lust and lust, not in strife and envy; but trust in Our Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh to satisfy sensuality.
I did not read any further, nor was it necessary that I did, for instantly, at the end of the sentence, by a light, so to speak, of confidence, which penetrated my heart, all the darkness of doubt disappeared.
“Closing the book, then, and putting my finger between the sheets, or any other mark, with a calm attitude, I communicated to Alípio what was happening to me. And he revealed so much to me of what was going on in him that I did not know. He asked me to see what I had read. I showed it to him and he read even further than I had read and he didn't know what went on. It was actually this: 'Welcome him who is weak in faith,' which he applied to himself and revealed to me. With this warning he felt refreshed, and thanks to a good resolution and purpose, quite in keeping with his character (in which, with advantage, he was always quite different from me), he quickly joined me. From there we went to my mother. We tell you what happened; she was filled with joy. We tell you how this came to pass;she vibrated with joy and triumph, and blessed Thee, who are 'able to give in abundance and excess, far beyond what we asked or thought, for she realized that You had given her more for me than she used to ask for, with their pitiful and most painful moans. Because You knew how to convert me so well to You, that I no longer sought a woman, nor any other of the hopes of this world, remaining in that rule of faith to which You, so many years before, had led me in a vision. And you changed her grief into joy, far more fully than she had wished.”that I no longer sought a woman, nor any other of the hopes of this world, remaining in that rule of faith to which You, so many years before, had led me in a vision. And you changed her grief into joy, far more fully than she had wished.”that I no longer sought a woman, nor any other of the hopes of this world, remaining in that rule of faith to which You, so many years before, had led me in a vision. And you changed her grief into joy, far more fully than she had wished.”
The yoke of their carnal appetites had been cast off; the enchantment of his ambition undone. At the age of thirty-two, the sensual Augustine renounced women; the “word seller” was ready to give up his Rhetoric professorship in order to live a life in accordance with God's truth.
On his way to Damascus, Saul had turned into Paul with a suddenness of lightning. Antao had heard the priest's words in church, got up and went to distribute his goods. But “Augustine was not a man of sudden decisions. Its manifestations were not determined by sudden impulses. The emotional outburst in the garden had simply freed him from the ultimate grip of his inner nature, hitherto able to curb the high aspirations of his intelligence, preventing him from reaching the ultimate heights of thought in God.
The garden conversion took place several weeks before the end of the current school year. In heart and soul Augustine felt detached from his duties as a teacher, but in order to avoid publicity, he decided to continue his work until vacation time. In the meantime he dissolved his love relationships with all the skill of a man in the world. He left it to Alipius to dispatch his new mistress as gracefully as possible, while Monica would have to carry out her decision to break off their engagement.
Antony had interpreted his conversion to mean that he must retire to the solitude of a desert cave. Augustine, who was a man of intelligence, chose a different path to God.
After school, he retired in the company of his mother, brother, son, Alipio and numerous other friends to a pleasant country house in Cassiciaco, which his friend Verecundo had lent him. He did not live there as a penitent, but rather as a philosopher, who had turned his back to the world in order to enjoy the true bliss of pure thought. Undisturbed, in pleasurable simplicity, and surrounded by the stimulating circle of relatives and friends, he spent the most pleasant of vacations, in aesthetic and philosophical discussions, often softened and animated by jokes and laughter. Monica was not just the ruler of this celibate family. It also took part in his intellectual inquiries. "A woman in costume," wrote Augustine of his mother at that time, "a man of faith and vigor of thought,with all the tranquil security of age, the love of a mother and the devotion of a Christian”.
In Cassiciacus, the thinker Augustine set himself the task of re-examining, in the light of his new standards, all the things his intelligence had hitherto been unable to accept as valid.
"I wished," he once said, "to be as well informed about both metaphysical things and visible things, to be as sure and sure of them, as I was that seven and three equal ten."
It is now the center of a kind of academy, following the old model. He and his group discussed all the problems of science, philosophy and literature, the poems of Virgil, the writings of the Neoplatonists and of every other school of pagan philosophy. Six full days were spent to settle the question of whether happiness could be obtained without knowing it.
Alongside all this, Augustine also devoted his time to writing something. He gave a final literary form to his dialogues with friends, wrote short works, "Da Vida Feliz", "Da Ordem", "Against the New Academy" and composed one of his most profound essays, "Do Mestre", a summary of his conversations with his son Adeodato, who, despite his fifteen years, was, as he said, his equal in intelligence and of the whole group gathered in Cassiciaco.
As the vacation drew to a close, Augustine wrote to Bishop Ambrose, asking him to be accepted as a convert and to receive the holy sacrament of baptism at Easter. At the same time, he asked for his resignation from the position of Professor of Rhetoric. Not wanting to cause any sensation yet, he explained his resignation as a consequence of his state of health. Other than that he was actually suffering great shortness of breath and his voice lost in strength and sound, he was still in good shape.
In April 387, Augustine returned to Milan to prepare for baptism. He studied the doctrines of Christ and composed several of his books, all of which—both in subject and form—followed closely with the pattern of ancient thought. He wrote about rhetoric, dialectics, geometry, arithmetic, philosophy, about the elements of music and the seven liberal arts.
During this period he also composed his two famous Soliloquia books, which are possibly the most revealing of all the works of this man, who found his way to God through the strength of his intelligence. "Have confidence in the conditions of your thinking," says Reason by way of a summary of the Soliloquia argument. "Have confidence in the truth, for the truth itself tells you that it lives within you, that it is immortal and that it cannot lose- if by physical death. Depart from your shadow and turn inward. You cannot perish, save for losing the truth that you cannot let be lost.” And Augustine replies to Reason: "I hear you, take courage, I will begin to live again."
The problems with which Augustine grappled, during this time immediately preceding his baptism, were in short the essence of classical science and philosophy. It was destined to become part of the great structure of Christian thought, for the characteristic function of Augustine, the first great thinker and intellectual genius of the Christian era, was to make use of the immortal treasure of ideas from the decaying world of the ancients, as building material. for the rising Christian culture of the West.
On the night before Easter, Augustine, together with Alipius and his son Adeodato, was baptized by Bishop Ambrose. In a solemn ceremony, which symbolized the rebirth of the convert from death in sin to new life in Christ, he professed his faith in the Redeemer.
After his baptism, Augustine decided to return to Africa. His thirst for fame and success had driven him from his homeland to the European continent. As a convert, desirous of living from then on in the service of Christ, he felt an urgent need to back off the steps taken and return to the starting point of his career.
All the members of the small group of Christians who accompanied him in his new life in Christ were Africans. And African was too. almost everything that influenced his career as a saint.
It was African Plotinus, the founder of Neoplatonism, whose teachings were instrumental in Augustine's conversion. African was Victorian, the man whose translation had made Neoplatonist writings accessible to him and whose conversion had impressed him as a most glorious example. And finally, the hermit Antao was an African, whose exemplary life had shocked him so profoundly that the whole future course of his life on earth was decided by him.
Antony and Augustine were not the first Africans to make important contributions to the growth and development of Christianity. Origen and Tertullian, the greatest Christians of the first two centuries, had both been Africans, and the powerful school of Alexandria had also been an African institution.
Three continents worked together in shaping the culture of Christianity. The Christian faith arose in Asia Minor; it was given the status of world power by the Roman Empire and Europe; but in shaping typically Christian and Western molds of thought, Africa can be said to have played the really decisive role.
The ship that would transport the small group of Africans back to their homeland left the Roman port of Ostia. It was there that Agostinho spent the last few days of waiting, before the appointed time for departure. During those days he suffered a painful loss. Monica died. He was then fifty-three years old. He was thirty-three.
“I cannot express the affection she showed me and with how much more vehement anguish she suffered the pains of me in spirit than she had suffered from my pregnancy in the flesh,” Augustine later wrote of the dead woman whose loyal heart had only come to appreciate properly from this time of your conversion. "My life and hers had become one and now that one life was violently torn apart because she had left me."
To the mother of his spiritual rebirth, he dedicated an immortal monument to Augustine in a passage from his confessions, where he tells of his last and ecstatically mystical conversation with Monica, which he held, one afternoon in early summer, a few days before her death.
“She and I were alone, leaning against a certain window that overlooked the garden of the house, where we were then. We were then talking together, alone, and we were talking about eternal life.
Rising with more ardent affection towards the 'One', we passed gradually, through all corporeal things, until reaching the very sky, whence the sun and moon and stars cast their light upon the earth; yea, we rode even higher, thanks to intimate ecstasy, and conversed; and we reached our own minds and went beyond them, so that we could reach that region where life is the Wisdom by which all things are made, for which the 'was' and the 'will' no longer exist, but just 'being', since it is eternal. And as we went on talking about her and we yearned for her, we lightly brushed against her with a total rapture of our heart.”
It was the eternal truth, the guardian of all things, which they touched thanks to the effort of their “active thoughts”. “When we were talking about these things, the whole world around us disappeared. The tumults of the flesh were silenced, the images of earth, water and air were stilled, the poles of the sky were also stilled, in fact silence was imposed on the soul itself, all dreams and imaginary revelations were stilled, every loud word and signs of silence and whatever exists only in transition, everything quieted, and in this extreme silence there was only one thought awake, which beheld the ultimate face of wisdom: God. We sighed and left behind the first fruits of the Spirit and returned to the vocal expressions of our mouth, where the spoken word has a beginning and an end.”
In this conversation, in which mother and child rose above the things of the world and united in a mystical vision of eternal truths, we see Augustine and Monica, for the first time, as St. Augustine and St. Monica, whom the Church venerates .
The earth, into which his mother's body had sunk, did not want to let him go. He postponed his return to Africa for another year. He spent this time in Rome. But it seemed to be a different city from the one he had left not long ago, when all the young rhetorician's ambitious hopes for fame and success had foundered. So he had looked at her from the standpoint of her individual career. But now he came as a changed person and saw in Rome the eternal city of Christianity, the place of suffering of the martyrs, the Rome of the Church. And only now did he really come to know the Christian Church, whose faith he had embraced, in its organization as a universal and spiritual institution. His stay in Rome was the apprenticeship of the man destined to become one of the major masters within the structural organization of the Church.
In the year 388, Agostinho disembarked at the port of Carthage and went from there to his hometown, Thagas. He transformed the house he had inherited from his father, where he had spent his sinful youth, into a kind of monastery, where he lived for two years, in the company of several like-minded men, in monastic seclusion.
During this period, his conversion, which had begun in the garden in Milan, was definitively consummated. He composed his first religious work, the first truly Augustinian masterpiece, De Vera Religione, On True Faith. Secluded contemplation had transformed the intellectual philosopher into a Christian thinker. only his character but also his talent, and in particular his eloquence.
For fifteen years he had abused this gift, like a “seller of words”; but now, when his days were spent in prayer and silence, his eloquence was also tamed by an ascetic discipline, When he found himself ready to raise his voice again, to speak again before men, the brilliant rhetorician had been transformed in a preacher of the truth of Christ.
Without taking the initiative himself, he soon had an opportunity to prove his merit as an inspired preacher. Bishop Valerian of Hipo Regis, on the coast, invited the sage who lived as a monk to spend a few days in his house, as his guest. During his stay in Hippo, Augustine complied with the bishop's insistent requests and spoke to the Christian faithful of the local church. The faithful were deeply shaken by his sermon and would not allow him to return. They acclaimed him as a priest and finally Augustine had to satisfy their impetuous demand. He accepted the post of assistant to the old bishop and after his death in 395 he succeeded him in the post.
Hippo, modern Bonn, was far removed from the Christian centers of Rome and Constantinople. At that time his diocese was of little importance. Thanks to the works of Augustine, the city soon moved into a focal point of Christian thought, for it was there that the foundation for the entire future development of Christianity was laid, not only as an organization but also as a religious doctrine. What Augustine, “pope in the spirit”, taught and wrote in his remote episcopal seat, assumed, in due course, an importance inferior only to that of the Holy Bible.
At the beginning of the fifth century, a time fraught with dangers for Christian unity, it was the superior intelligence of St. Augustine that saved the Church from falling prey to a multitude of schismatic tendencies and disintegrating attacks. It was a time when paganism tried once again to regain lost hegemony. While Augustine preached the Gospel in his church in Hippo, Faun's priests were celebrating their barbaric festival of lupercais outside. The northern tribes of the Goths and Vandals had penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of the empire. The very existence of the latter was in danger, and the Church, already closely linked to the State, was in danger of going down with it in general overthrow.
Within the Church itself, destructive tendencies were also at work. There were the Donatists, the "Puritans of early Christianity," who declared that a sinner cannot be a member of the Church is certainly not an ordained priest. They established an African national Church, and the circumcelia, a faction of characteristically fanatical Donatists, began raiding Christian temples, stoning Orthodox priests, and trying to advance the cause of their doctrine by all sorts of terrorism. Then there were all those various heretical movements, clearly in the ascendant at that time, whose endless controversies over dogmatic details only served to blur the plain meaning of the original Christian beliefs. Along with Manichaeism and Arianism,it was mainly the British monk Pelagius's will-power doctrine that snatched increasing numbers of Christians out of the old Church. The Pelagians denied the importance of divine grace as a necessary means of salvation and proclaimed an absolute autonomy of human will.
Augustine himself, who had found his way to orthodox Christian faith only at the end of a long spiritual odyssey, was qualified, like no one else, to refute all these attacks against Christian dogma. His intimate knowledge of all the principles of pagan thought enabled him to convincingly demonstrate the absurdity of all arguments in favor of the restoration of paganism. His past of sins and his final conversion made it possible for him to speak with experience when he had to prove the danger and fallacy of the Donatist idea that all former sinners should be expelled from the Church. As an ancient Manichean, he knew the illusory attraction of Manes' doctrines.
Going back in his mind to the time when he had listened to the arguments of Ambrose, the powerful opponent of Arianism, in Milan, he had no lack of evidence in support of the divinity of Christ. And the Pelagians, at last, faced in him a man whose thought had always revolved around the problem of the freedom of the will, so that he was quite sure of its worth, as well as its limitations.
In his struggle against heretics, both his skill as a writer, which enabled him to compose his controversial treatises, and his oratorical talents in it were kept in very good shape. In ecclesiastical councils, at conferences and from the pulpit, his words were always full of such powers of conviction and inspiration, which even his opponents could not but be impressed. However, Augustine's appearance was in no sense imposing or vigorous. He did not look at all like the figure El Greco painted, adapting the physical proportions of his saints to their spiritual stature. It was rather small and insignificant in appearance. Even her voice had lost its resonance from years of asthma. But the things that this unimpressive man said, in a flat, flat voice,ensured the survival of the Catholic Church.
To the arduous tasks of preacher and combatant of the Lord were now added the varied duties of first pastor of the diocese.
Agostinho heard confessions, dispatched administrative affairs, managed the assets of his bishopric, presided over trials, and was in charge of a thousand and one other things.
During the episcopate of Augustine in the year 410, Rome, the holy city of Christendom, fell into the hands of Alaric's Gothic hosts. The danger of being ruled by migrating Teutons hung heavily on the African continent. The Vandals, following in the footsteps of the Goths, flocked to Spain and were ready, under the leadership of their King Gaiseric, to break out in a decisive campaign against North Africa.
At the beginning of the year 429, an army of eighty thousand Vandals crossed the Straits of Gibraltar and advanced into North Africa.
Hippo was one of the fortresses that remained for some time in Roman hands. Endless columns of fleeing people ran into the city, and the resulting difficulties gave Augustine an opportunity to prove himself a first-rate protector and organizer. In his hands the property of the Church became the property of the needy. He fed the hungry, dressed the naked and rescued the captives. His eagerness to help knew no bounds; it was as limitless as human misery and misery.
Finally the city of Hippo had to suffer the fate of all other cities and towns in North Africa. In May 429, Gaiseric's troops surrounded her and held her in siege. Within the city the bishop devoted every hour of the day to his work of comfort and assistance. He was seventy-six years old. He finally had to give in to the weight of his efforts. A deadly fever sapped his strength. His eyesight weakened and doctors forbade him to read. For his comfort and edification, he asked that King David's penitential psalms be written in large letters, on sheets of parchment that could be nailed to the wall opposite his bed, where he could see them to the end.
On August 28, 430, while crowds of vandals, drunk with victory, hammered at the city gates, Augustine died in his monastic house, surrounded by faithful and praying friends.
Augustine's life as bishop of Hippo is, in its simple grandeur, the holy counterpart of the confused and turbulent years of his former life. And yet this last part of his life is simply the setting for the truly immortal greatness of that saint, for the creative work of his intelligence.
The fire was ugly in the course of the quiet nights and rare hours of leisure that the overworked pastor, administrator, and fighter for the faith had reserved for himself. With indefatigable persistence, sitting in his little monkish cell and covering the sheets of parchment one after another, he composed book after book, one masterpiece after another masterpiece. There he wrote not only his Confessions, but countless treatises, pamphlets and essays on problems of pedagogical, philosophical and epistemological importance, on controversial issues of contemporary significance, and on matters of ecclesiastical administration and reform. Some two hundred and thirty-two books were conceived by this most productive of all thinkers and authors. One hundred volumes bring together the works he left to posterity.They represent a veritable encyclopedia of the entire treasure of Catholic Christian thought. He compiled it and created it in part.
The influence of almost all of the works composed by Augustine was profound and lasting. Yet the Confessions of this “sinner turned saint” are unrivalled in their fascination for modern readers, which owes in part to their unconditional honesty and in part to the wonderfully acute psychological knowledge of their author.
The thirteen chapters of this work were written in 377, about ten years after Augustine's conversion. In them the devout bishop of Hippo turned his gaze to his sinful past and asked God, in a spirit of repentance, to hear his confession.
His passionate introspection gave him the courage to penetrate the deepest depths of the grande profundum homo, of the great abyss called man. One man, who might well have said that "nothing about man is alien to him," gave the world, in the form of these thirteen chapters, the liveliest and most masterful work of self-disclosure to be found in the literature of any time or country.
The first nine chapters tell the story of Augustine's outer life, of his struggle against animal carnality and its nature. In the tenth chapter, Augustine turns his attention from the outer to the inner life. He, who had tried in vain to discover the solution to the riddle of personality in the turmoil of material existence, came here to the conclusion that life in the body is fragmentary. And so he began to investigate his inner life, in order to discover, on the basis of the variegated multiplicity of the phenomenal world, the true unity of himself and of all life. He was looking for his own soul, because he was looking for God. Self-knowledge, he hoped, would lead him to the knowledge of God. “O Lord,” he exclaimed, “help me to understand You. Help me understand myself. For understanding You, I will get to know myself. And once you understand me,I will come to know Thee. So I pray Thee, O my God, to make me discover myself!"
His search for the ultimate truth made him sensitive to the most delicate psychological changes. And the sharpness of their observation was married to a power of expressive skill, which could describe the indescribable with astonishing precision and accuracy.
Thus he wrote: “I turned inside myself and said to myself: Who are you? And he answered: A man, for we see here a soul and a body in me: one outside, the other inside. By which of the two should I seek my God, for whom with the help of my body I have inquired, from earth to heaven, even as far as I was able to send the rays of light from my embassy eyes? But the best part is the inner part, to which all these bodily messengers of mine dedicate their intelligence, as being the president and judge of all the various answers from heaven and earth and all the things that are there, that say: We do not we are God and He made us. These things made my inner man know through the outer man. And I, the inner man, knew all this: I, the soul, through the senses of the body,Thanks to this true soul I will ascend to Him; I will go back beyond that faculty of mine through which I am united with my body and through which I fill all its form with life.”
His analysis of sensory impressions, sensations, emotions, and voluntary actions, all the fluctuating elements of human consciousness, did not, however, lead to the ultimate and unchanging personality. So he penetrated deeper and reached the fixed point of consciousness: memory, "I have arrived," he wrote, *to the spacious fields and places of my memory, where are the treasures of innumerable images, placed therein by things of every kind perceived. by the senses. There is stored there anything beyond what we think. In its immeasurable space the records of my sensations are also stored. And there are also things learned and not yet gone. Great is the force of memory, exceedingly great, O my God, a fourth vessel and without limits.”
The excitement of a man discovering one. A new continent cannot be greater than the awe which gripped Augustine, the man who for the first time explored the vast and unknown realms of the soul. “Wonderful admiration surprises me, astonishment dominates me at this! And men go abroad to admire the heights of the mountains, the strong waves of the sea, the great torrents of the rivers, the rhythm of the oceans and the orbits of the stars, and they do not look at themselves.”
Soon, however, Augustine recognized that even the vast expanse of consciousness was not enough to solve the riddle of the self. And tried beyond the limits of memory powers. It advanced to the sphere of oblivion—the subconscious—where things that have been detached from memory are preserved, but remain active as causes and motives for emotions and actions. And he discovered that dreams are the threshold that leads to the realm of that other self.
“There still lived, in my memory,” he wrote, “the images of things such as my bad habit had fixed them there; and they burst through my thought—though without strength—even when I was wide awake. But in sleep they fell on me, not just to delight, but mainly as actions performed. In such a high degree the illusion of that image prevails, both in my soul and in my flesh, that these false visions persuade me, when I am asleep, in a way that true visions cannot do when I am awake. Am I not myself then, O Lord my God? And yet there is quite a difference between me and myself in the moment when I pass from wakefulness to sleep, or returning from sleep to wakefulness. Where is my reason on that occasion why my mind when it's awake,resist suggestions such as these? Are you asleep with the senses of my body?
“Through all this I run and advance as far as I can and find no end. So great is the force of life in mortal man. O my God, what a terrible secret, a deep and limitless multiplicity And this thing is the spirit, this is me, myself! What am I then? What nature is mine? An exceedingly immense varied life!
“Who will solve this riddle, who understands what it means?
I, at least, truly toil within him, yes, and toil within myself; I became a hard ground, demanding plenty of sweat from my forehead. For we are not now discovering the regions of the sky, or measuring the distances of the stars, or inquiring the movements of the earth. It's about me. I... my spirit!”
Augustine, the saint of the early Christian era, in his attempt to find God in the mechanism of his senses, instincts and emotions, had reached the limit that separates the conscious from the subconscious realms of the soul. With this discovery he anticipated many important conclusions of modern psychology and philosophy, such as Bergson's definition of memory and Freud's doctrine of the subconscious.
If Augustine had simply been a curious investigator of the human soul, he would never have tried to go beyond the limits of rational understanding. In pursuing his search for God, however, he had to go further, as all the results and conclusions so far obtained were by no means a satisfactory answer to the reactive questions to “From” and “Why” about God, the Creator and ultimate cause of all existing things. For without such an answer all his knowledge of the human soul remained fragmentary and the progress in introspection which he had accomplished was simply part of the path to eternal truth, which lies beyond the limits of an individual life.
“With my outer senses,” he wrote, “as well as I could, I went over this world, noting the life the body has of me and these senses of myself. From then on I turned resolutely to the separate rooms of my memory, to those numerous and vast rooms, so wonderfully filled with innumerable provisions, and considered and was filled with amazement, not being able to discern anything, without “Your help and not finding Yourself in none of all that, I was not the discoverer of those things either, I, who passed over them all, and who now endeavored to distinguish and evaluate each thing according to the merit of each one of them: receiving some things with my deficient senses and inquiring, feeling other things mixed with my own self. Yea,and taking particular notice of the rapporteurs themselves, and soon afterward examining deeply some things heaped up in the vast treasure of my memory, storing some of them there again, and withdrawing for my use some others. Nor was I myself, that is, my own, that ability by which I did it, nor was it You, for You are that light that never goes out, that I consulted with regard to all those things to see if they existed, the what they were and how they should be evaluated.”for You are that light that never goes out, which I consulted concerning all those things to see if they existed, what they were, and how they should be evaluated.”for You are that light that never goes out, which I consulted concerning all those things to see if they existed, what they were, and how they should be evaluated.”
But then "a spiritual force, which thought itself was unable to contain," came to his aid and enabled him to look beyond "the apex of his self." And he recognized the ultimate motive and cause which was no longer identical with 'anything within him, but was a force of a class all his own and called by the name of God.
And thus arose the Augustinian conception of God, according to which the Creator precedes all human knowledge and exists independently of the ability of human thought to know Him.
The transitory contact with God, which Augustine had once experienced, together with his mother, for the brief period of a conversation, had now become a permanent part of his stock of knowledge.
In the final chapters of the Confessions, the analytical thinker gave way to the mystic. Here Augustine no longer reported what he had thought, but what he had seen. He wrote about the finite that touches the infinite, about time, which changes into eternity, and about the self that reaches God. This visualization of the human soul mingling with the actions of God, as described in the Confessions, took an even more powerful form in the work of Augustine On the Trinity. Here he again investigated the basic structure of the human soul and conceived it as three and one in all its manifestations; and all the ternary series which he established—such as being, knowing, wanting, thinking, consciousness, love—impressed him as modeled after the nature of the Triune Godhead.
"In a miraculous way," he wrote, "the inner man bears in these three forces the image of God imprinted upon his being."
Augustine's wisdom was not just the product of abstract deductions. It consisted of truths discovered by experience, of laws that governed man's soul and thought and which he had deciphered in his own life.
Thus descending into the darkest depths of its human soul, it is also of every human soul, and at the same time ascending to its highest peaks, from where it unveiled in mystical vision the ultimate limits of its realm, it encompassed the entire extent of human thought and human emotions. What he discovered for himself and in himself immediately added to the benefit of all mankind. As he expanded the limits of his own inner life, he also expanded the intellectual and spiritual limits of humanity. "Is not my heart the heart of man?" he wrote.
In the history of Western thought it is the priest of the early Christian Church, St. Augustine, who must be credited with having been the first to investigate man's inner life, and thus it is possible to see in him the founder of modern Psychology .
When Augustine wrote his Confessions, a thousand years had passed since Heraclitus, the “Dark Philosopher”, the “Father of Metaphysics”, had written as one of his one hundred and thirty-three maxims the phrase: “I seek myself. ” Almost at the same time, in the fifth century BC, the portal of the temple of Apollo in elves bore the inscription: "Know thyself!" But Heraclitus' phrase of wisdom and the Delphi inscription were also little more than pretty phrases, and even Socrates, the greatest thinker of antiquity, had to admit: “And yet I am not able to know myself, like the Delphi's maxim tells me to do it."
The investigative spirit of the ancients, which spread throughout the Universe, paid little or no attention to the enigma of the human soul. There is nothing in all the literature of the ancient Greeks and Romans that can in any way compare with the interior analysis of Augustine's confessions. When the ancients talked about themselves, they did so to justify their actions or to establish their rights to fame and gratitude. Everything they had to say about themselves was related to the "outward man" and never led to a revelation of their essential and intimate nature. Marcus Aurelius, the "philosopher of the throne", wrote, it is true, his famous Meditations, but even these are rather a general commentary on their morals and ethical principles.
It was only through Christianity, whose doctrines were of superior importance to the individual human soul, that it was possible to awaken in man the desire for true introspection. Only the Christian conscience, which felt responsible to God for its actions and thoughts, could lead to confession in the full sense of the word.
And Augustine, the sinner on the way to holiness, who knew all the depths of hell and the heights of heaven, is the first “self-researcher” and “self-revealer” of true greatness.
A thousand years separated the Confessions of Augustine from the maxim of Heraclitus and another thousand years had to pass before the Confessions realized the reorientation in the course of human thought, which gives them their great historical importance.
Augustine's theological essays assumed immediate dogmatic importance for all of Christendom, but the purely speculative forms of thought of the Byzantine era and also of the ensuing centuries of medieval scholasticism, whose main aim was to establish a theologically flawless definition of the concept of God, they were not equipped to achieve a fair appreciation of the Confessions. Only the Renaissance, with its individual tendencies, was finally ready to accept them with sympathy and understanding. It is certainly not a mere coincidence that it was Petrarch—the protagonist of Renaissance individualism—who discovered the genius of self-analysis, St. Augustine, and followed his example.
Petrarch, the poet of Cancioneiro, was so typically modern, in his emotions and reactions, that he undertook to climb a mountain simply because he enjoyed both the landscape and the physical exercise at the same time. On April 81, 1836, he climbed Mount Ventoux, the highest peak in the vicinity of Avignon, in the valley of the Rhône River. It was a difficult climb, and when he reached the summit and his eyes were intoxicated with the sublime alpine landscape, he decided—in true Renaissance style estilo—that not only his senses but also his soul must participate in the grandeur of the moment. He accidentally opened the volume of the Confessions, which he took with him wherever he went, and caught sight of the lines: "And men go abroad to admire the heights of the mountains, but they do not look at themselves." And he felt that this had been written for him.
“I decided,” he wrote of this event, “that I had seen much of the mountain and turned my inner gaze to myself. In silence, I contemplated our great lack of inner sight, when, disdaining our noblest part, we lose ourselves in multiplicity and seek outside what we can find within us. How many times during this memorable day have I circled the view to see the summit of the mountain and it seemed to me that it measured only a few feet compared to the elevation of inner self-reflection.”
His experience at Monte Ventoux marked a decisive turning point in the course of Petrarch's life. Hitherto this poet had lived in complete abandonment to the joys of mundane existence, but now he has retired to the solitude of Vaucluse, where he spent his life in penitent confession and introspection.
In his own “Confessions”, the Secret, or the Conflict between the Soul and the Passion, he chose St. Augustine as his imaginary father confessor and guide. To him she confessed her most secret instincts, her vanity and her hunger for fame and profit and the inertia of her heart. And Augustine, the imaginary interlocutor in this dialogue, warned and encouraged him in his search for the true blessedness of a life inspired by God.
All of Petrarch's last works and particularly his essay De Vita Solitaria are full of the spirit of St. Augustine.
Petrarch was the most renowned poet of his time. His conversion and his example of “being intoxicated by the living miracle of self and eager to communicate the results of his study” exerted a certain influence in his time and contributed substantially to the development of the typical Renaissance mentality. He called attention again to his great model, Augustine, and only then did the time come when the confessions of this ancient Christian saint could rightly be regarded as one of the most powerful determining factors in the course of Western spiritual history.
A veritable flood of confessions and self-examination followed. Terônimo Cardano used all his scientific care and precision in the investigation of his own self. Benvenuto Cellini, the beam, whose autobiography exerted such a great fascination on men like Goethe and Oscar Wilde, tried to overpower St. Augustine, “the master of confession,” by the extreme frankness of the story of his shameful exploits. Jean-Jacques Rousseau even took the title of Augustine's famous work for his own Confessions, Addressing Reason, the new goddess of the 18th century, exclaimed: “I have divulged the most intimate part of myself, as only You , Being Eternal, you have seen it!” And full of vainglory, he added: the work I did is without example, and no one will ever be able to imitate it. I will show the world a man in the full truth of his nature,and I will be this man, I alone!" Rousseau's Confessions became, in due course, the inspiration for all the confession literature of the French Romantic era. De Musset, Alfredo de Vigny, Vítor Hugo, and Madame de Stael rivaled each other in revealing their innermost selves. From France, confessional fever soon affected England and Germany, where objective self-analysis increasingly often took the place of emotional outpouring.where objective self-analysis has increasingly taken the place of emotional outpouring.where objective self-analysis has increasingly taken the place of emotional outpouring.
But all of them, French, English and German, were overshadowed in fervor and perseverance by the remarkable Swiss professor of Aesthetics, Genevan Henrique Frederico Amiel, who renounced real life in order to describe the life of his thoughts and emotions. This martyr of self-disclosure spent thirty years in complete seclusion and during that time composed a gigantic work of forty-eight volumes, consisting of sixteen thousand and nine hundred pages, devoted entirely to the observation of his inner self.

The nineteenth century turned out to be the greatest century of confessional literature.
The Danish philosopher Kierkegaard, the Russians Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, the Englishman De Quincey, and the Swedish dramatist Strindberg—to name just a few—all of them presented the world with emotional and penitent, or simply descriptive, analyzes of their intimate lives.
In the 20th century, the literary form of the confessions becomes the autobiographical novel, sufficiently characterized by the simple mention of men like Marcelo Proust, James Joyce and Luís Fernando Céline.
However, as much as the literature of fifteen hundred years, elapsed since the time of Augustine, may have enriched and broadened man's knowledge of himself, none of the later works manages to equal the power of that ancient genius, “looking beyond the apex of his self” and discovering beyond the limits of the ephemeral individual the general and eternally valid aspects of the human soul: 0 aeternum internum. Thus Augustine's Confessions continue to be what they were once called, “a work of solitary grandeur.
Of equal significance for the spiritual development of Western civilization were the twenty-two books of Augustine's The City of God, the Civitas Dei. The composition of this work began in 413, three years after the fall of Rome. Augustine worked on it, with interruptions, for fourteen years. It was conceived to satisfy a suggestion made by Augustine's friend Marcellin, a Christian tribune of Carthage. Its purpose was to refute the charge made in pagan camps that the introduction of the Christian faith had angered the gods and was responsible for the fall of Rome. In this work Augustine began with a discussion of the struggle for the eternal city, but, in dealing with him, this historical event took on more than a historical importance.His personal problem of the struggle of good and evil was presented as the basic problem for all humanity and even for all life on earth. In a magnificent synthesis of divine and secular phenomena, he made it a universal and all-encompassing conception. It confronted the mundane city of Rome with the heavenly city of God, the civitas with the civitas Dei, and divided all mankind into citizens of two rival communities, the inhabitants of the city of carnal pleasures and those of the city of spirit.the inhabitants of the city of carnal pleasures and those of the city of the spirit.the inhabitants of the city of carnal pleasures and those of the city of the spirit.
The forces of evil were shown in man, in their social consequences, as flowing from an egoistic orientation of the will, which always constitutes a violation of the law and the meaning of the whole, an aberration in the sense of private and individual interests. Under the law of evil, Augustine argued, the wealth that is given to the individual, as a means or an instrument, becomes a goal and an end in itself; what should serve to help man in his aspiration for the highest good becomes an abuse by the individual's attempt at self-enrichment. In the ideal city of God, seen by Augustine, community life, social relations, justice, State and Church are always evaluated in their relationship with the infinite: things that are linked in time, space and matter are made to take their place, within the framework of God's eternal plans.
In an interpretation of visionary impulse, Augustine followed in pursuit of the origin of evil beyond time and material existence, to the metaphysical moment of man's creation, to the fact of its innate corruption; and equally until the final stabilization of right and wrong on the Day of Judgment. The conflict of good and evil thus assumed the character of a cosmic drama, taking place in the spheres beyond time and space, where origins and the Day of Judgment met.
Agostinho's Cidade de Deus has all the fascination of one of the most remarkable works of literature. In it the boldest visions and the most realistic narratives work smoothly together, to conjure up the same images, contemporary accounts of the battlefield and the fate of fallen angels, Roman history and the history of creation, anecdotes of time and eternal events blend together. itself in the proclamation of the same truth.

The City of God served as a model for all later theories of world church politics. It was Charlemagne's favorite work and engendered in him the idea of ​​the Holy Roman Empire. But the great political utopias of the past fifteen hundred years also drew their inspiration from this work of Augustine.
The ideas exhibited at Cidade de Deus have not lost their opportunity to this day. When Augustine condemned imperialism and war, when he stipulated the extreme ideal of peace and equality for all men of good will, without regard to race, nationality or creed, he addressed all times, including our own.
There is hardly a problem of profoundly human importance that Augustine has not addressed in some part of his varied and voluminous work. Whether it was the problem of time, the origin of language, music, or medicine, anywhere His thought exceeded the limits of its time and anticipated the conclusions of the most advanced thinkers of the present. He conceived of the phenomenon of time as a special form of consciousness and could well be considered a precursor to our modern relativism. In terms of a strangely modern flavor, he spoke of language, as a crystallization of unconscious thought forms and archetypes. Investigating the causes and nature of morbid conditions,it established a certain interdependence of soul and body and concluded—again anticipating modern ideas—that physical disturbances can lead to mental and psychic anomalies. He discussed the mysterious affinity of the human soul and the art of music with such delicate understanding that his argument deserves the fullest respect of today's music theorists.
It is hardly surprising that all of Augustine's work is not devoid of antitheses and contradictions. While he, however, was deeply certain of the "beauty of the opposite poles," which his genius could envision as an organic whole, his spiritual heirs were not capable of anything of the sort. Not paying attention to the larger context, they took detached fragments of his work and exposed them as representing the extreme Augustinian truth. As a result, Augustine's doctrine was made to support and complement the basic principles of the most varied and even the most opposite trends of thought.
Augustine's wisdom inspired the "ultimate Roman thinker," Boethius, to write in the sixth century the purely philosophical meditations of his De Consolatione Philosophiae, or The Consolation of Philosophy.
Augustine's speculative analyzes of the idea of ​​God had a profound influence on medieval scholasticism, that trend of thought that tried to force its way through reason into the supernatural realm of revealed truths. His experience of God inspired Christian mysticism, that other trend that taught the importance of reason and discovered true knowledge of God through grace in ecstatic visions.
Scott Erigena, Abelard and Anselmo of Canterbury, as well as Bernardo de Clairvaux and Master Eckart confessed their debt to Augustine, the first great teacher of rational thought and the first great representative of Christian mysticism. Thomas Aquinas, Augustine's only peer among the many Christian thinkers of genuine greatness, invoked at the beginning of his Summa Theologiae precisely the authority of Augustine, to show that he was not obliged to accept with blind faith every word that Augustine had spoken.
Augustine's Doctrina Christiana, the oldest pedagogical textbook in the Western world, served during the Middle Ages as the last authority on matters of education and provided the foundations on which the first European universities were built.
The great humanists, whose intellectual vision broke with the scholastic past and marked the beginning of modern times, nevertheless regarded Augustine as their spiritual ancestor. For them he was the first Christian universalist, the first Christian thinker in whose spirit a harmonious fusion of classical and Christian thought had been accomplished; and since, according to them, it was thanks to Augustine that knowledge had been elevated to the position of Christian virtue, they looked to him as the founder of Christian civilization in general.
The Renaissance honored him as the emancipator of self and individuality. When a new form of Platonism emerged, to resume the struggle against the Aristotelian tradition of the Middle Ages, it appealed to the authority of St. Augustine, looking at him as the great Christian thanks to whom the Platonian tradition had been preserved and enriched,
Catholic defenders of the idea that the Holy Church is indivisible and one and that the part it plays as mediator between man and God is indispensable and cannot be replaced, as well as representatives of the Reformation, who fought against tradition and Church dictatorship, for the right of free Christians to discover God in their own souls, invoked the support of the Augustinian authority. He is regarded as the father of orthodoxy and, at the same time, as a precursor of the Reformation. Wycliffe and Huss appealed to him and Luther regarded him as the pole star of the purified Christian faith. The Protestant doctrine of the pre-eminence of faith over good works, of grace over reason, is basically an Augustinian doctrine
In the great conflict between Jansenists and Jesuits, in which one faction fought for the idea of ​​predestination and the other for the principle of free will, both sides invoked the support of the authority of St. Augustine.

To justify its persecution of heretical dissidents, the Inquisition appealed to Augustine's resistance against the Donatists, and later protagonists of freedom of conscience drew their main arguments from the Augustinian writings.
Baroque religious fervor derived its inspiration from Augustine's religious sentiment. It was the prototype of their passionate devotion, and artists of that era liked to adorn their altars and pillars with the figure of Augustine, symbolically depicted with a man holding a flaming heart in his right hand.
It is not at all difficult to trace the principles of Cartesian rationalism in Augustine's works. The famous axiom of Descartes, the founder of modern philosophy, “Cogito ergo sum”, “I think, therefore I am”, was anticipated by Augustine in his Confessions as well as in the City of God. Spinoza, whose philosophy was a continuation of that of Descartes, also walked in the footsteps of St. Augustine. He also regarded self-knowledge as the first stage in man's knowledge of God and praised this truth as the key to perfect happiness. His assertion that "the finite and the infinite are one in God" is not only characteristically Spinotian but also Augustinian.

1, There is a great difference between the Catholic doctrine and that of the separated Christians on Faith and good works, grace and nature. For the Catholic there is an absolute transcendence of the Faith over the good works. The first link that links the Catholic to Christ is really to Faith. Being a gift from God, it is Faith independent of human effort. Sanctification, before being a human effort for God, is above all and above all a descent from God to us. The Gospel is clear: "Without Me you can do nothing." "No one goes to the Father unless he is drawn to Him" ​​Therefore, it is not works before justification that save us. Saint Faith is Baptism: "Whoever believes and is baptized, he will be saved.
However, since man has been raised by grace, since his faculties (intelligence and will) have been deified without being mutilated, his purely human cooperation is necessary, but imbued with the strength of God's grace. St. Augustine never denied this need for cooperation on the part of Man, for he did not ignore the words of the apostle Peter:
"wherefore, my brethren, put ever greater diligence in ensuring your vocation and election, through good works." (IIPD 1,10). St. Augustine himself beautifully comments on the text of St. Paul, "I complete in me what the “Passion of Christ” lacked: 'Christ”, he writes, “suffered all that he should have suffered; nothing lacks in the measure of His passion; yes the passion is complete, but in the Head; there is still the Passion in the Body”. And Pascal echoes of Doctor of Grace, when he says: "Christ will be in agony until the end of the world."
If S, Paul states that are worth nothing works for justification, refers to the previous to grace St. James. it also speaks of the same ones necessary for justification, but after grace.

If one can trace the trajectory of Augustine's influence in the works of practically all the great philosophers of modern times, it is particularly visible in the case of the so-called Romantic School of Philosophy. Pascal, the great initiator of this trend in the 17th century, owed, in large part, his progress to the precedent of St. Augustine. A celebrated prodigy in mathematics, he suddenly turned his back on this science, severed his social ties, abandoned the prospect of an extremely profitable marriage, and retired to the abbey of Port-Royal, where he led a life of renunciation, deeply absorbed in the study of works by Augustine. The undeniable grandeur of his Thoughts is unaffected by the fact that they are often mere variations on an Augustine theme.
Romantic philosophers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries consciously turned to the fourth-century Church Father. This is startlingly apparent in the case of the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard and the Frenchman Malebranche. Cardinal Newman, lastly, who taught that God is immanent in the human soul, has rightly been referred to as "Augustinus redivivus."
With the exception of Plato, no other thinker exerted such a varied and feverish influence on Western thought as Augustine. His thought, his deductions and conclusions were the fate of European civilization. They are still alive today.
He started out as a restless "good for nothing" from Thagaste...

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